LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



Chap.„ Copyright No. 

Slielf..__«C_3 
L^C c 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



gixe Students' %tx its xrf ^xtQlxsJx Classics. 

1 

THOMAS CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

•1 

ON 

ROBERT BURNS. 



EDITED BY 

W. K. WICKES, M.A. (Amherst), 

Principal Syracuse High School, 




NOV 3 



LEACH, SHEWELL, & SANBORN, 

BOSTON. NEW YORK. CHICAGO. 






*v 



Copyright, 1896, 
By Leach, Shewell, & Sanborn. 



Typography by C. J. Peters & Son, Boston. 



Presswork by Berwick & Smith. 



- - 

PEEFACE 



In reading this delightful monograph, it should con- 
stantly be kept in mind that Carlyle did not attempt, in 
any formal or biographical sense, to write a life of the 
poet, but simply used The Life of Robert Burns, by J. G. 
Lockhart (Edinburgh, 1828), as a convenient text about 
which to group many sentences of shining rhetoric, keen 
criticism, and, best of all, a great deal of noble and in- 
spiring sentiment. Indeed, the monograph, first printed 
in the Edinburgh Review, No. 96 (1828), had as its title 
only that grand monosyllable which for more than a 
century has thrilled the hearts of the lovers of lyric 
poetry, — Burns. 

Therefore, let no student come to the reading of this 
little book with the purpose merely of rinding certain 
facts in the life of the poet; for while the facts are 
there, they are incidental and subsidiary to the revela- 
tion of the mind and soul of the poet. To know the 
mind and soul of the poet, — that should be the aim of 
the student. Eeading thus, Carlyle will be found to be 
the revealer of 

"The light that never was, on sea or land; 
The consecration and the Poet's dream." 



iv PREFATORY NOTE. 

And surely that should redeem the reader from 
slavery to a mere literary task, — a compelled service 
performed in slave-like fashion. It should, it must, 
suffuse his heart with the glow of sympathy. In such a 
frame, he will find Carlyle to be an inspirer, breathing 
into his soul many a sweet and pure suggestion, many 
a strong and purposeful sentiment; so helping him, as 
high literature ever should, to make his own life and 
action more noble. 

W. K. W. 

November, 1896. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Preface iii 

Biographical Sketch (Thomas Cablyle) 1 

Essay on Burns 17 

Notes 99 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 



In seeking to trace the sources of a great man's power, it 
is easy to lay too much stress upon the influence of ancestry. 
Not so, however, in the case of Thomas Carlyle ; for had we 
no other testimony upon that point, his own would be com- 
plete and convincing. In his father, James Carlyle, were 
blended great natural mental aptitudes, clearness of judgment, 
strength of purpose, and an inflexible sense of duty. It was 
he, the son testifies, who was bent on " educating me ; that 
from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and col- 
lege, and made me whatever I am or may become." 

But not less potent, though in a different way, was the 
influence of his mother, Margaret Aitken, second wife of 
James Carlyle. In her was a fine mingling of native intelli- 
gence and emotional qualities ; the latter serving to some 
extent to smooth away asperities, and even to introduce into 
the household certain homely amenities of life. Again the 
son testifies, at her death, in the wish that he may pass his 
days " with the simple bravery, veracity, and piety of her that 
is gone ; that would be a right learning from her death, and a 
right honoring of her memory." 

Of that good head-stock and heart-stock which was in 
James and Margaret Carlyle was born at Ecelefechan, Dum- 

1 



2 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

friesshire, Scotland, Dec. 4, 1795, Thomas Carlyle, the most 
original writer, certainly, of his time. 

Carlyle, the lad, received the first lessons of his educa- 
tion under the family roof-tree, his father teaching him to 
" count," his mother to read. Soon passing into the village 
school, he was pronounced by the schoolmaster " complete in 
English" at seven years of age. Thence he went to Annan 
Academy, there pursuing Latin, " less Greek," French, alge- 
bra, geometry. But the knowledge there gained did not 
satisfy the eager mind of the youth, — still less did it content 
the father, bent upon the completest education for his son 
which the schools of Scotland could furnish. And so the 
year 1809 found him in Edinburgh, a student of famous 
Edinburgh University. Reading between the lines which 
Carlyle himself has written concerning his college life, it is 
not difficult to believe that he pursued his studies with dili- 
gence, and yet with that independence and instinct of selec- 
tion which mark the born student, more or less conscious of 
his innate powers. As a result of this " untaught ability " to 
discriminate, leading him to make a difference in the zeal 
with which he took up various subjects, the young Scotch 
student was not distinguished for his rank in college or the 
formal excellence of his scholarship. Yet beyond a doubt he 
received from his university training the very best thing which • 
any university can bestow, — best stated by Carlyle himself, 
when, many years after his graduation, he returned as chosen 
rector of the university to deliver his rectorial address : The 
university, he declared, had taught him to read in various lan- 
guages, in various sciences, so that he could go into the books 
which treated of these things, and gradually penetrate into any 
department he wanted to make himself master of. In other 



THOMAS CABLYLE. 6 

words, it was a knowledge of books, and how to use them, 
that Carlyle chiefly valued — a sentiment finely consonant 
with that of his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, pleading for 
the establishment in every college of a " professorship of 
books." 

The life of Carlyle, from young manhood on, was in a 
sense a quiet one, as well befitted a scholar and writer; yet 
it was by no means devoid of noteworthy incidents. We 
see him, soon after leaving the university, casting about,, as 
many young men of genius before and since, to lay hold upon 
his life's calling. All thought of the minisitry, the cherished 
wish of his father's heart for him, he had, from motives of 
conscience, put aside; his resolution to study law was given 
up when he found he could not do it and at the same time 
earn a livelihood. Teaching, first at Annan, his old school, 
and afterwards as private tutor in Edinburgh, his university 
" toun," proved only a makeshift ; and at length his lasting 
and right choice settled upon literature — upon book-making, 
in the high and noble sense of that word. 

It was while he was still in search of his sphere of work 
that Carlyle met Jane Welsh of Haddington, a lady whose 
fine presence and rare qualities of mind deeply impressed him. 
They were married in 1825, and for many years thereafter, as 
Jane Welsh Carlyle, she held wide sway in the literary circles 
in which he was so marked a figure, while her constant sympa- 
thy with him in his literary struggles, her keen appreciation 
of his powers, and her unfeigned joy at his successes, cheered 
him and helped him to mastery. They lived at Edinburgh 
for a year and a half ; and then many considerations of health 
and pocketbook induced Carlyle to remove to Craigenputtoch, 
a wild and lonely spot far removed from the homes and 



4 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

haunts of his literary fellows. But Carlyle knew what he was 
doing, and clearly discerned that in that sequestered corner 
of the land he could best utter the thoughts surging within 
him. Here it was that he did much good work in the field of 
German literature and criticism, and here that he wrote that 
remarkable essay on Burns, — the text and theme of this little 
book. 

Before his marriage Carlyle had been in London, and some- 
what cheered at the prospect of literary employment and pre- 
ferment. But dyspepsia, unrelenting enemy of his physical 
life, sad disturber of his mental and spiritual powers, made 
sharp attack upon him, and caused him to beat a retreat 
to Annandale, away from the noisy metropolis. It was the 
year 1834 before he again ventured upon London life ; but 
this time it was to stay, and to make memorable as the 
home of " the Sage of Chelsea," old No. 5, now No. 24, Cheyne 
Row, — a house now come to be a veritable literary shrine. 
It was in this house at Chelsea that the greatest intellectual 
tasks of Carlyle's life were wrought ; within and about this 
house that the shadow and sunshine of that life — more of the 
first than of the second — longest lingered. 

Several of the seeming failures of Carlyle's life must be 
reckoned among his real successes, or at least among the liter- 
ary world's good fortunes. For if he had obtained the profes- 
sorship of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrew's University, a 
place eagerly sought for him by his friends ; or been chosen 
as the man to found a normal school under the auspices of 
a National Educational Association, a scheme into which he 
made inquiry ; or accepted a History Chair in his old univer- 
sity, as many undergraduates heartily wished him to do ; or 
taken a seat in Parliament, as Froude once suggested to him, 



THOMAS CARLYLE. O 

— had any one of these duties fallen to his ot, it is quite 
probable that we would not have had the greater part of those 
books which have made the name of Thomas Carlyle, and his 
fame as a writer, so great and enduring. 

Let us be glad, however, that Carlyle did accept several in- 
vitations to deliver courses of lectures. For while the lectures 
seemed hardly more than an " aside " in the drama of his life, 
a mere incident in his prolonged literary labors, yet they 
served to reveal to breathless audiences the rugged power, 
absolute sincerity, and intense passionateness of the man ; best 
of all, they dealt with themes such as German Literature, 
Heroes, Revolutions of Modern Europe, Heroes and Hero Wor- 
ship, — themes so welcome since to Carlylean students. 

To the credit of Thomas Carlyle's life should be placed, 
also, the founding of a library in London. Trained to the 
use of books, keenly appreciating their value, roused by the 
lack of such books as he imperatively needed for his own 
researches, he set about the task of creating a library, and 
ceased not, aided by influential friends, till success was com- 
plete and a refreshing fountain was opened, still flowing in 
busy London. 

Perhaps no event of Carlyle's literary life was so honorable 
to him, and rightly so enjoyable, as his installation as Rector 
of Edinburgh University. The office is purely an honorary 
one, imposing no duty except that of delivering a rectorial 
address. But it is an office that money cannot buy, nor rank 
and influence command. And it came to Carlyle as the prac- 
tically unanimous voice of the student-body of the university, 

— the hearty recognition of his worth as writer and man. 
His immediate predecessor was Mr. Gladstone. Greater con- 
trast in manner and matter of speech could not be ! Yet Car- 



6 BIOGBAPHICAL SKETCH. 

lyle's address was as signal a triumph of God-given speech as 
had been that of " the grand old man." 

But the gladness of triumph was soon changed to sorrow 
for Carlyle ; for before he returned to London, his wife, — 
shaper and sharer of his fortunes, — who had been unable to 
accompany him to Edinburgh, died very suddenly. " What- 
ever triumph there may have been in that now so darkly over- 
cast day," he cries, " was indeed hers." For our part, we 
purpose to let that statement stand as the deliberate and final 
estimate by Thomas Carlyle of the influence over, and worth to 
him of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Whoever wishes to read the rec- 
ord of domestic differences may find them written down in 
various places. 

It only remains, in this brief sketch of some of the salient 
facts in Carlyle's life, to add that he bequeathed the estate of 
Craigenputtoch to Edinburgh University for bursaries. He 
died Feb. 5, 1881, and was buried in the old kirkyard at 
Ecclefechan. 

Just here a few words concerning some of Carlyle's con- 
temporaries and critics may not be amiss, in the effort to 
get a general estimate of the man as influenced by his sur- 
roundings. For while he seemed to be, and indeed was, singu- 
larly independent of others and of their criticisms, — at one 
time saying, " They have said, and they will say, and let them 
say," — and while he was himself a fierce critic of others, as 
many a sharp passage in his writings will attest, it is yet true 
that a few literary men of his time, and a few men of action as 
well, had a strong grip upon the mind of this strongly self-cen- 
tred man. It was of Edward Irving, the famous preacher, who 
was a lifelong friend, that Carlyle wrote, " His was the freest, 
brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 7 

with." With Jeffrey the critic, Carlyle had many a conversa- 
tional tussle, — I know of no better word by which to describe 
it ; and while the author was more than a match for the re- 
viewer, Carlyle was undoubtedly influenced, if only to stronger 
belief in his own views. In John Sterling, younger than Car- 
lyle, graduate of Cambridge, and a clergyman, he found a rare 
and congenial spirit, who understood the rugged Scotchman, 
and, in Old-English phrase, was understanded of him. John 
Stuart Mill, philosopher, was on friendly terms with Carlyle, 
and must have made impress, though faint, by his willingness 
to hear and accept new truth, upon a man too prone to see 
but one side of great questions and problems, — and that, of 
course, his own side. In praise of Sir Robert Peel, statesman, 
Carlyle was very enthusiastic, — for him, — and carried his re- 
gard so far as to dedicate to him his Cromwell. Of the Duke 
of Wellington, soldier, Carlyle speaks commending the expres- 
sion of " nobleness there is about the old hero," adding, " Ex- 
cept for Dr. Chalmers, I have not for many years seen so 
beautiful an old man." So much out of the ordinary run of 
writers was John Ruskin, that Carlyle found much in him to 
commend, and, we may well believe, found an originality of 
expression quite equal, in its way, to his own. But the list of 
Carlyle's contemporaries is so long that we must stop with 
mention of but two more : Goethe, the great German writer, 
so different from the Scotch writer in the make-up of his mind 
and character, that one is lost in wonder at the tremendous 
sway he had over Carlyle ; Ralph Waldo Emerson, our own 
great American, having such kinship of intellect and origi- 
nality with the sturdy Scot, that we wonder not, but are 
lost in admiration at the fine communion for half a cen- 
tury of these two rare souls. 



8 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

Of the critics of Thomas Carlyle in his own day and since, 
the name is legion. But among them all, one, James Anthony 
Froude, most conspicuously stands forth. This would natu- 
rally be so from the fact that Carlyle himself, in the most 
unreserved fashion, put into the hands of Froude a mass, 
literally, of letters, correspondence, documents, and the like, 
appertaining both to his wife and himself, with the sanc- 
tion of his entire consent and wish that the historian make 
whatever use he saw fit of any and all of it, — to print it or 
to burn it. He printed ; but thereby awoke a clash of con- 
troversy the echo of which has not yet wholly ceased to re- 
verberate. A more generous critic, and perhaps quite as 
just, is Professor Masson, who had most excellent opportu- 
nities for study of the great Scotch writer, and has given 
us, in small compass, a delightful sketch of Carlyle Person- 
ally, and in His Writings. And quite recently in the Famous 
Scots Series appeared a life of Carlyle, suggestively written, 
by H. C. Macpherson. 

But whatever certain of Carlyle's contemporaries and his 
critics, early and late, may have reiterated of blame or re- 
frained to utter of due praise, not one that has not found 
admirable qualities in Carlyle as a man. They all tell us, 
and tell us truly, that his passion for truth, as he conceived it 
to be, was of such high sort that no allurement could entice 
him away from its steadfast pursuit, or cause him to use it for 
furtherance of any plan or scheme not worthy of the truth's 
own inherent holiness. We know that a rich baron proffered 
any sum Carlyle might name to secure his advocacy of a bill, 
and not an ignoble one, brought before Parliament. But the 
offer was declined, Carlyle choosing to herald the truth in- 
volved in the bill in his own time and way. 



THOMAS CAELYLE. 9 

There was also in this man a fine, discriminating sense be- 
tween certain outward honors which it was sought to bestow 
upon him, and the heartfelt tokens of his friends. A pension, 
together with the Grand Cross of the Bath, freely offered by 
Mr. Disraeli, premier, is declined ; a gold medal, the loving 
gift of his Scotch countrymen, he is delighted to accept. 
This, it seems to me, clearly suggests that the applause of 
men, and that kind of fame which is only " notoriety turned 
gray," were of less account in his eyes, not so dear to his heart, 
as the appreciation of the home-folk. And this of a man who 
has been charged with coldness and cynicism ! See, also, if the 
outcroppings of his sympathetic nature do not find clear de- 
notement in the essay on Burns ! 

That Carlyle had grave infirmities is beyond question, — 
dyspepsia menacing his health ; a " constitutional sadness " 
shadowing his thoughts; brusqueness of speech; distaste for 
" dinner popularity ; " disregard for social amenities. But it is 
his own cry, " We make too much of faults." Let us who seek 
to judge his life avoid the mistake which he confesses ! And 
let it serve to hide a multitude of Carlyle's own faults, that he 
was so impatient at all sham or pretence, so absolutely intoler- 
ant of all wrong, interpreting his famous dictum, " Might is 
right," as he ever did, with his pen and by his life : Righteous- 
ness is the mightiest force in the universe of God. 

But in Thomas Carlyle, ancestry, education, companionships, 
the incidents of life, and even the qualities of the man as 
man, were mingled and fused to make the writer. Of writ- 
ing books he says, " It is the one use of living for me." Right 
nobly did he fulfill his calling ! For while he wrote much 
which the oft-changing fashion in letters has cast into the 
limbo of forgotten words, he also uttered many thoughts 



10 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

which the world " will not willingly let die." Into that 
limbo of the forgotten have passed many of the abstractions 
and philosophizings of his earlier years and of his intense 
study of German literature and philosophy. Yet even when 
these proofs of the " mortality of literature " have disappeared, 
there still remains, in these very writings, a great deal of 
most worthy thought. Cast out also, if you will, much that 
Carlyle wrote upon the social problems of the day, — for you 
may find therein many conf usions and contradictions ; yet 
the gems of thought and sentiment remaining, even despite 
their incrustations of curious expressions, will well repay 
perusal, and incite the mind to serious thinking. Add now 
to this most excellent residuum of his philosophical and 
sociological writings the many wonderful delineations of 
character and characteristics of famous personages in his- 
tory, and the sum total will be, a bo<f ". literature un- 
matched in modern English letters for its vigor of thought, 
originality of expression, deep insight into motives, subtle 
yet strong sympathy for the right, fiery denunciation of the 
wrong. 

And now a brief examination of the three main kinds of 
Carlyle's writing — philosophical, sociological, and historical 
— may, I trust, confirm my statement, or at least send the 
thoughtful student to the works of the master himself, therein 
to seek, I trust to find his own confirming judgment. 

In speaking of Carlyle's philosophical writings, we do not 
mean to intimate that he founded, or minutely copied, any 
system of philosophy. There was too much originality in 
him for the latter ; too little of formal coherency in thought 
and expression for the former. But he had his theories, in 
part drawn from German metaphysics and mysticism, and 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 11 

in part the results of his own independent thinking, all 
fused into a sort of unity by his rare power to recreate and 
combine. From the stern orthodoxy of his father he soon 
broke away, finding in it no safe pathway of transition from 
the natural to the supernatural, and proclaimed himself the 
child of " a new spiritual birth." It seems to have been 
Gibbon who caused him to break away from the traditions 
and beliefs of the Scotch Covenanters ; and Goethe, who stood 
as godfather to the new-birth child. To the various philo- 
sophical theories of Carlyle the term " transcendentalism " has 
often been applied, — a word which as well describes those 
theories as any one word can. But, as it would not comport 
with the purpose of this brief sketch to enter into an analysis 
of a term so variously used and subject to such wide-apart 
interpretations, it must here suffice to mention several works 
of Carlyle in whicfy; outcroppings of philosophical thought 
are quite frequent. Thus, in the so-called Miscellanies, made 
up very largely of magazine articles, the reader is struck with 
the abstract and abstruse nature of much of the thought, 
as though the writer were resolved to mount " the bright- 
est heaven of invention " upon the wings of his own read- 
ing and thinking. And in Sartor Resartus, in some respects 
foremost among his philosophical writings, he essayed an- 
other lofty flight; but so deftly mingled illustration, com- 
ment, imagery and appeal with abstractions and soliloquies, 
as to make the book memorable for all time, — in very truth, 
" the survival of the fittest " in literature. 

But a man so deeply sympathetic by nature as was 
Thomas Carlyle could not spend all his best days and ripest 
powers in the service of the metapl^sical, — even though 
illumined, as by him, with radiant thoughts on life. From 



12 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

early manhood there kept ringing in his ears the cries of the 
poor and oppressed, and the vision of them was ever before 
his eyes. But hearing and seeing meant, with him, to write. 
And so came forth Chartism, a small volume, so earnestly — 
and effectively in an argumentative sense, — pleading the cause 
of the toilers in field, mine, and shop, that Conservative and 
Liberal alike took alarm, fearing lest the foundations of gov- 
ernment might be overturned. In the same general path 
followed a book with the taking title, Past and Present. In 
many respects it was a strong and fascinating book, yet with 
a fatal " sin of omission," namely, the failure to point out any 
remedy for present ills save such as the past had " tried and 
found wanting." And still again, with a persistency born of 
his nature and strengthened by his observation of the poor, 
he put forth the Latter-Dai/ Pamphlets, — a series of papers so 
trenchant, radical, and counter to the general trend of British 
civic life, that many men called it " madness," and gave him 
more credit for " method " in it all than rightly belonged to 
him. For it was just the lack of method that made Carlyle's 
fierce logomachies so bloodless. In other words, there was 
great outcry against the grinding ills of life, but only faint 
whispers of a way of release or relief ; in short, he was sympa- 
thetic, not systematic. But such was the nature of the man, 
.squaring exactly with his own theory, that the heart is more 
potent than the head ; and so it is — sometimes. 

But neither in philosophy nor in social science is Carlyle at 
his best as a writer. His dramatic instinct and delineative 
power, coupled with his stoutly-held theory that great men 
make up the history of the world, all combined to render his 
historical works the most shining marks of his genius. Here 
the great artist — great despite his mannerisms and short- 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 13 

comings — pictures scene after scene in his mind, and repro- 
duces them upon the pages of his books in " thoughts that 
breathe and words that burn." He is the Turner of literary 
color ! Of no book is this so true as of the French Revolution. 
Therein are piled great masses and moving shapes of color, 
rising as if out of the seething sea of that red Revolution, and 
flaming against the dark background of the French people 
and life of that stormy period. Nor let it be said that this 
is not history — that history is not thus written. For while it 
may be conceded that the cause and cure of revolution are not 
traced with calm and judicial analysis, the moral of the dread- 
ful story is made so plain that " he who runs may read," and, 
best of all, cannot but remember. And even dramatic history 
remembered is better than dry history forgotten. 

With so much that was Puritanic in the character both of 
the Scotch writer and the great leader of the Commonwealth, 
it seems strange that Carlyle did not get more quickly and 
enthusiastically into the heart of his Cromwell, — a book, the 
writing of which caused him a great deal of worriment. It 
proved to be a successful work, however, and put the grim 
warrior upon a high pedestal of renown in the eyes of many 
men of republican tendencies, — and enhanced the fame, also, 
of Thomas Carlyle as a dramatic historian. 

Perhaps, however, the loudest acclaim that greeted the ears 
of Carlyle was heard upon the completion of his life of Freder- 
ick the Great. That voice of well-deserved praise soon passed 
beyond the confines of the British Isle, and was re-echoed 
from the German Fatherland. For Carlyle's Frederick was 
at once recognized as a masterpiece, — a work of genius, into 
which had gone the research and toil of many years. It com- 
pletely met Carlyle's own thought of genius as the capacity 



14 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

for infinite work. It stamped him, also, as " a bright and 
shining light " among writers, — and he still illumines the 
great World of Letters! 

Finally : In a time of discouragement, Carlyle once an- 
nounced his intention to withdraw to the « Transatlantic 
Wilderness." We can but wonder what he would have found 
in us of America, or we in him ! Or had he later yielded 
to the voice of Emerson tempting him to a lecture course in 
this country, what would have been our impressions ! But 
he did not come. In lieu of that, and better than that, we 
may learn much of the man (and his opinion of many other 
men) from his own Reminiscences. Macpherson tells us that 
Carlyle "creates the standard by which he is judged," — a 
remark both paradoxical and true. But many of Carlyle's 
own countrymen, especially those who could not brook any 
departure from orthodox conventionalities of thought and ex- 
pression, would not accept such a standard. So the critic- 
conflict raged. Other critics have attacked Carlyle's English. 
Now let it be confessed at once that many of his sentences 
will not " parse," nor square by the rules of his distinguished 
countrymen, Lindley Murray and Peter Bullions. But let not 
the reader be overmuch disturbed at that, but rather enjoy to 
the full his lightning-like exclamations, his wonderful delinea- 
tions and word-picturings, his wide-compassing vocabulary ; 
in short, the elemental power of his diction. (Perhaps, in- 
deed," it is true of his English that he " creates the standard " 
etc.). 

Moreover, Carlyle's thought was borne upward and onward 
on two wings, which, even-poised, will carry a writer higher 
and farther than any others, — Humor and Pathos. The first 
has often been denied to him, but not truly. It led him 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 15 

to say of Sir Robert Peel, that it was that great statesman's 
sense of " fun " that he liked best of all in him ; and it often 
appears, grimly to be sure, in his writings. As for the sense 
of true pathos, in Carlyle it is almost unmatched. To prove 
it by quoting would detain us too long ; but the student may 
find ample proof in the essay on Burns, at this very minute in 
his hands. Add, now, that keen sense of the right which was 
in Carlyle, — a point to which we have before this alluded, 
the dominant note, indeed, of his works, — and surely it must 
be confessed that few men have greater claim to the thought- 
ful attention of the student of noble literature than Thomas 
Carlyle. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 1 



In the modern arrangements of society, it is no 
uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like 
Butler, " ask for bread and receive a stone ; " for, in 
spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it 
is by no means the highest excellence that men are 5 
most forward to recognize. The inventor of a spinning- 
jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day; but 
the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true 
religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not 
know w r hether it is not an aggravation of the injustice, 10 
that there is generally a posthumous retribution. Robert 
Burns, in the course of nature, might yet ' have been 
living; but his short life was spent in toil and penury; 
and he died, in the prime of his manhood, miserable and 
neglected ; and yet already a brave mausoleum shines 15 
over his dust, and more than one splendid monument 
has been reared in other places to his fame : the street 
where he languished in poverty is called by his name ; 
the highest personages in our literature have been proud 
to appear as his commentators and admirers, and here 20 

1 Carlyle's review of " Lockhart's Life of Robert Burns." 
17 



(y 



18 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

is the sixth narrative of his Life, that has been given to 
the world ! 

Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this 
new attempt on such a subject : but his readers, we be- 

5 lieve, will readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will censure 
only the performance of his task, not the choice of it. 
The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot 
easily become either trite or exhausted ; and will prob- 
ably gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the dis- 

10 tance to which it is removed by Time. No man, it has 
been said, is a hero to his valet : and this is probably 
true ; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet's 
as the hero's : For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye 
few things are wonderful that are not distant. It is 

15 difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere man 
whom they see, nay, perhaps, painfully feel, toiling at 
their side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be 
made of finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some 
dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neigh- 

20 bor of John a Combe's, had snatched an hour or two 
from the preservation of his game, and written us a Life 
of Shakspeare ! What dissertations should we not have 
had, — not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the 
wool-tragle and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant 

25 laws ! and how the Poacher became a Player ; and how 
Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and 
did not push him to extremities ! In like manner, we 
believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions 
of his pilgrimage, the honorable Excise Commissioners, 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 19 

and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, and the 
Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, 
equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old 
Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have be- 
come invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible 5 
only by light borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will be 
difficult to measure him by any true standard, or to 
estimate what he really was and did, in the eighteenth 
century, for his country and the world. It will be diffi- 
cult, we say ; but still a fair problem for literary his- 10 
torians ; and repeated attempts will give us repeated 
approximations. 

His former biographers have done something, no 
doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. 
Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, 15 
have both, we think, mistaken one essentially important 
thing : — Their own and the world's true relation to 
their author, and the style in which it became such 
men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr. Currie 
loved the poet truly ; more perhaps than he avowed to 20 
his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere in- 
troduces him with a certain patronizing, apologetic air ; 
as if the polite public might think it strange and half 
unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar, and 
gentleman, should do such honor to a rustic. In all 25 
this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not 
want of love, but weakness of faith ; and regret that the 
first and kindest of all our poet's biographers should 
not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he 






20 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the same 
kind : and both, err alike in presenting us with a de- 
tached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, vir- 
tues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting 

5 character as a living unity. This, however, is not 
painting a portrait ; but gauging the length and breadth 
of the several features, and jotting down their dimen- 
sions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much 
as this : for we are yet to learn by what arts or instru- 

10 ments the mind could be so measured and gauged. 

Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both 
these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high 
and remarkable man the public voice has now pro- 

• nounced him to be : and in delineating him, he has 

15 avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather 
sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, say- 
ings ; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the whole 
man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. The 
book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more 

20 insight, we think, into the true character of Burns, 
than any prior biography ; though, being written on the 
very popular and condensed scheme of an article for 
Constable's Miscellany, it has less depth than Ave could 
have wished and expected from a writer of such power, 

25 and contains rather more, and more multifarious, quo- 
tations, than belong of right to an original production. 
Indeed, Mr. Lockhart' s own writing is generally so 
good, so clear, direct, and nervous, that we seldom wish 
to see it making place for another man's. However, 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 21 

the spirit of the work is throughout candid, tolerant, 
and anxiously conciliating ; compliments and praises are 
liberally distributed, on all hands, to great and small ; 
and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeck observes of the society in 
the backwoods of America, " the courtesies of polite 5 
life are never lost sight of for a moment." But there 
are better things than these in the volume ; and we can 
safely testify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly 
read a first time, but may even be without difficulty 
read again. 10 

Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the 
problem of Burns's Biography has yet been adequately 
solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of 
facts or documents, — though of these we are still every 
day receiving some fresh accession, — as to the limited 15 
and imperfect application of them to the great end of 
Biography. Our notions upon this subject may perhaps 
appear extravagant ; but if an individual is really of 
consequence enough to have his life and character re- 
corded for public remembrance, we have always been 20 
of opinion, that the public ought to be made acquainted 
with all the inward springs and relations of his charac- 
ter. How did the world and man's life, from his partic- 
ular position, represent themselves to his mind ? How 
did coexisting circumstances modify him from without ? 25 
how did he modify these from within ? With what en- 
deavors and what efficacy rule over them ? with what 
resistance and what suffering sink under them ? In one 
word, what and how produced was the effect of society 



22 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

on him ? what and how produced was his effect on 
society ? He who should answer these questions, in 
regard to any individual, would, as we believe, furnish a 
model of perfection in biography. Eew individuals, in- 

5 deed, can deserve such a study ; and many lives will be 
written, and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, 
ought to be written, and read, and forgotten, which are 
not in. this sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake 
not, is one of these few individuals ; and such a study, at 

10 least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our 
own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty 
and feeble ; but we offer them with good-will, and trust 
they may meet with acceptance from those for whom 
they are intended. 

15 Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; and 
was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual 
fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily 
subsiding into censure and neglect ; till his early and 
most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm 

20 for him, which, especially as there was now nothing to 
be done, and much to be spoken, has prolonged itself 
even to our own time. It is true, the " nine days " 
have long since elapsed ; and the very continuance of 
this clamor proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. 

25 Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as years 
passed by, he has come to rest more and more exclu- 
sively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now be well 
nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not only 
as a true British poet, but as one of the most consider- 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 23 

able British men of the eighteenth century. Let it not 
be objected that he did little : he did much, if we con- 
sider where and how. If the work performed was small, 
we must remember that he had his very materials to 
discover ; for the metal he worked in lay hid under the 5 
desert, where no eye but his had guessed its existence ; 
and we may almost say, that with his own hand he had 
to construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found 
himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without in- 
struction, without model ; or with models only of the 10 
meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in 
the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled 
with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has 
been able to devise from the earliest time ; and he works, 
accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past 15 
ages. How different is his state who stands on the out- 
side of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must 
be stormed, or remain for ever shut against him ? His 
means are the commonest and rudest ; the mere work 
done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind 20 
his steam engine may remove mountains ; but no dwarf 
will hew them down with the pick-axe ; and he must be 
a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms. 

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. 
Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, 25 
and in a condition the most disadvantageous, where his 
mind, if it accomplished aught, must accomplish it under 
the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and 
desponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with 



24 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

no furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor 
man's hut, and the rhymes of a Fergusson or Ramsay for 
his standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these 
impediments. Through the fogs and darkness of that 

5 obscure region, his eagle eye discerns the true relations 
of the world and human life ; he grows into intellectual 
strength, and trains himself into intellectual expertness. 
Impelled by the irrepressible movement of his inward 
spirit, he struggles forward into the general view, and 

10 with haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit 
of his labor, a gift, which Time has now pronounced im- 
perishable. Add to all this, that his darksome, drudging 
childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era of his 
whole life ; and that he died in his thirty-seventh year ; 

15 and then ask if it be strange that his poems are imper- 
fect, and of small extent, or that his genius attained no 
mastery, in its art ? Alas, his Sun shone as through a 
tropical tornado ; and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed 
it at noon ! Shrouded in such baleful vapors, the genius 

20 of Burns was never seen in clear azure splendor, enlight- 
ening the world. But some beams from it did, by fits, 
pierce through ; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow 
and orient colors into a glory and stern grandeur, which 
men silently gazed on with wonder and tears ! 

25 We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is exposition 
rather than admiration that our readers require of us 
here ; and yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no 
easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity him ; and 
love and pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 25 

sometimes thought, should be a cold business ; we are 
not sure of this ; but, at all events, our concern with 
Burns is not exclusively that of critics. True and genial 
as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but 
as a man, that he interests and affects us. He was often 5 
advised to write a tragedy : time and means were not 
lent him for this ; but through life he enacted a tragedy, 
and one of the deepest. We question whether the world 
has since witnessed so utterly sad a scene ; whether 
Napoleon himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, 10 
and perish on his rock, " amid the melancholy main," 
presented to the reflecting mind such a " spectacle of 
pity and fear," as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler, 
and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a hope- 
less struggle with base entanglements, which coiled 15 
closer and closer round him, till only death opened him 
an outlet. Conquerors are a race with whom the world 
could well dispense ; nor can the hard intellect, the 
unsympathizing loftiness, and high but selfish enthusi- 
asm of such persons, inspire us in general with any 20 
affection ; at best it may excite amazement ; and their 
fall, like that of a pyramid, will be beheld with a cer- 
tain sadness and awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose 
heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of 
the " Eternal Melodies," is the most precious gift that 25 
can be bestowed on a generation : we see in him a freer, 
purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves ; 
his life is a rich lesson to us, and we mourn his death, as 
that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. 



26 THOMAS CAELYLE, 

Such a gift had Nature in her bounty bestowed on us 
in Robert Burns ; but with queen-like indifference she 
cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment ; and 
it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, be- 

5 fore we recognized it. To the ill-starred Burns was 
given the power of making man's life more venerable, 
but that of wisely guiding his own was not given. 
Destiny — for so in our ignorance we must speak, — 
his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for 

10 him ; and that spirit, which might have soared, could it 
but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious fac- 
ulties trodden under foot in the blossom, and died, we 
may almost say, without ever having lived. And so 
kind and warm a soul ; so full of inborn riches, of love 

15 to all living and lifeless things ! How his heart flows 
out in sympathy over universal nature ; and in her 
bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning ! 
The "Daisy" falls not unheeded under his plough- 
share j nor the ruined nest of that " wee, cowering, 

20 timorous beastie," cast forth, after all its provident 
pains, to " thole the sleety dribble, and cranreuch cauld." 
The " hoar visage " of Winter delights him : he dwells 
with a sad and oft-returning fondness in these scenes 
of solemn desolation ; but the voice of the tempest be- 

25 comes an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in the 
sounding woods, for " it raises his thoughts to Him that 
walketh on the wings of the wind." A true Poet-soul, 
for it needs but to be struck, and the sound it yields will 
be music ! But observe him chiefly as he mingles with 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 27 

his brother men. What warm, all-comprehending, fel- 
low-feeling, what trustful, boundless love, what generous 
exaggeration of the object loved ! His rustic friend, 
his nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean and homely, 
but a hero and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons 5 
of Earth. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen 
by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contra- 
diction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, 
are still lovely to him : Poverty is indeed his compan- 
ion, but Love also, and Courage ; the simple feelings, 10 
the worth, the nobleness, that dwell under the straw 
roof, are dear and venerable to his heart ; and thus over 
the lowest provinces of man's existence he pours the 
glory of his own soul ; and they rise, in shadow and 
sunshine, softened and brightened into a beauty which 15 
other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just 
self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into 
pride ; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for of- 
fence, no cold, suspicious feeling, but a frank and social 
one. The peasant Poet bears himself, we might say, 20 
like a King in exile ; he is cast among the low, and feels 
himself equal to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, 
that none may be disputed to him. The forward he can 
repel, the supercilious he can subdue ; pretensions of 
wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him ; there is 25 
a fire in that dark eye, under which the " insolence of 
condescension " cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his 
extreme need, he forgets not for a moment the majesty 
of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as he feels him- 



28 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

self above common men, he wanders not apart from 
them, but mixes warmly in their interests ; nay, throws 
himself into their arms ; and, as it were, entreats them 
to love him. It is moving to see how, in his darkest 

5 despondency, this proud being still seeks relief from 
friendship ; unbosoms himself, often to the unworthy ; 
and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart 
that knows only the name of friendship. And yet he 
was " quick to learn ; " a man of keen vision, before 

10 whom common disguises afforded no concealment. His 
understanding saw through the hollowness even of ac- 
complished deceivers ; but there was a generous credu- 
lity in his Heart. And so did our Peasant show himself 
among us ; " a soul like an iEolian harp, in whose 

15 strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, 
changed itself into articulate melody." And this was 
he for whom the world found no fitter business than 
quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, computing ex- 
cise dues upon tallow, and gauging ale-barrels ! In such 

20 toils was that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted : and a 
hundred years may pass on, before another such is given 
us to waste. 

All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, 
seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor 
•_>5 mutilated fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken 
glimpses of a genius that could never show itself com- 
plete ; that wanted all things for completeness ; culture, 
leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His poems 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 29 

are, with scarcely any exception, mere occasional effu- 
sions, poured forth with little premeditation, expressing, 
by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humor 
of the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted 
him to grapple with any subject with the full collection 5 
of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated 
fire of his genius. To try by the strict rules of Art 
such imperfect fragments, would be at once unprofitable 
and unfair. Nevertheless, there is something in these 
poems, marred and defective as they are, which forbids 10 
the most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. 
Some sort of enduring quality they must have ; for, 
after fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic 
taste, they still continue to be read ; nay, are read 
more and more eagerly, more and more extensively ; 15 
and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class 
upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but 
by all classes, down to the. most hard, unlettered, and 
truly natural class, who read little, and especially no 
poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. The 20 
grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which 
extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, 
and over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, 
are well worth inquiring into. After every just deduc- 
tion, it seems to imply some rare excellence in these 25 
works. What is that excellence ? 

To answer this question will not lead us far. The 
excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether 
in poetry or prose ; but, at the same time, it is plain and 



30 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

easily recognized : his Sincerity, his indisputable air of 
Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys ; no hollow 
fantastic sentimentalities ; no wiredrawn refinings, either 
in thought or feeling : the passion that is traced before 

5 us has glowed in a living heart ; the opinion he utters 
has risen in his own understanding, and been a light to 
his own steps. He does not write from hearsay, but 
from sight and experience ; it is the scenes he has lived 
and labored amidst, that he describes : those scenes, rude 

10 and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions 
in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves ; and he 
speaks forth what is in him, not from any outward call 
of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to 
be silent. He speaks it, too, with such melody and mod- 

15 illation as he can ; "in homely rustic jingle;" but it is 
his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret for find- 
ing readers and retaining them : let him who would 
move and convince others, be first moved and convinced 
himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me flere, is applicable in 

20 a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to 
every writer, we might say : Be true, if you would be 
believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine ear- 
nestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition, 
of his own heart ; and other men, so strangely are we 

25 all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will 
give heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, we 
may stand above the speaker, or below him ; but in 
either case, his words, if they are earnest and sincere, 
will find some response within us ; for in spite of all 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 31 

casual varieties in outward rank, or inward, as face an- 
swers to face, so does the heart of man to man. 

This may appear a very simple principle, and one 
which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the 
discovery is easy enough : but the practical appliance is 5 
not easy ; is indeed the fundamental difficulty which all 
poets have to strive with, and which scarcely one in the 
hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head too dull to dis- 
criminate the true from the false ; a heart too dull to 
love the one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of 10 
all temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. With either, 
or, as more commonly happens, with both, of these defi- 
ciencies, combine a love of distinction, a wish to be ori- 
ginal, which is seldom wanting, and we have Affectation, 
the bane of literature, as Cant, its elder brother, is of 15 
morals. How often does the one and the other front 
us, in poetry, as in life ! Great poets themselves are not 
always free of this vice ; nay, it is precisely on a certain 
sort and degree of greatness that it is most commonly 
ingrafted. A strong effort after excellence will some- 20 
times solace itself with a mere shadow of success, and 
he who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it 
imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man : 
yet if we examine his poetry with this view, we shall 
find it far enough from faultless. Generally speaking, 25 
we should say that it is not true. He refreshes us, not 
with the divine fountain, . but too often with vulgar 
strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon 
ending in dislike or even nausea. Are his Harolds and 



32 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

Giaours, we would ask, real men, we mean, poetically 
consistent and conceivable men ? Do not these charac- 
ters, does not the character of their author, which more 
or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing 

5 put on for the occasion ; no natural or possible mode of '£> 
being, but something intended to look much grander than N 
nature ? Surely, all these stormf ul agonies, this volcanic 
heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, 
with so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other 

10 sulphurous humors, is more like the brawling of a player 
in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than 
the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to 
last threescore and ten years. To our minds, there is a 
taint of this sort, something which we should call theat- 

15 rical, false and affected, in every one of these otherwise 
powerful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially the lat- 
ter parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere 
work, he ever wrote ; the only work where he showed 
himself, in any measure, as he was ; and seemed so in- 

20 tent on his subject, as, for moments, to forget himself. 
Yet Byron hated this vice ; we believe, heartily detested 
it : nay, he had declared formal war against it in words. 
So difficult is it even for the strongest to make this pri- 
mary attainment, which might seem the simplest of all : 

25 to read its own co?isciousness without mistakes, without 
errors involuntary or wilful ! We recollect no poet of 
Burns's susceptibility who comes before us from the first, 
and abides with us to the last, with such a total want of 
affectation. He is an honest man, and an honest writer. 



* 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 33 

In his successes and his failures, in his greatness and his 
littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with 
no lustre but his own. We reckon this to be a great 
virtue ; to be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, lit- 
erary as well as moral. 5 

It is necessary, however, to mention, that it is to the 
poetry of Burns that we now allude ; to those writings 
which he had time to meditate, and where no special 
reason existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct 
his endeavor to fulfil it. Certain of his Letters, and 10 
other fractions of prose composition, by no means de- 
serve this praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the 
same natural truth of style ; but on the contrary, some- 
thing not only stiff, but strained and twisted ; a certain 
high-flown, inflated tone ; the stilting emphasis of which 15 
contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged simplicity of 
even his poorest verses. Thus no man, it would appear, 
is altogether unaffected. Does not Shakspeare himself 
sometimes premeditate the sheerest bombast ! But even 
with regard to these Letters of Burns, it is but fair to 20 
state that he had two excuses. The first was his com- 
parative deficiency in language. Burns, though for most 
part he writes with singular force, and even graceful- 
ness, is not master of English prose, as he is of Scottish 
verse ; not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the 25 
depth and vehemence of his matter. These Letters 
strike us as the effort of a man to express something 
which he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second 
and weightier excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of 



34 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Burns' s social rank. His correspondents are often men 
whose relation to him he has never accurately ascer- 
tained ; whom therefore he is either forearming himself 
against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the 

5 style he thinks will please them. At all events, we 
should remember that these faults, even in his Letters, 
are not the rule, but the exception. Whenever he writes, 
as one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and on 
real interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, ex- 

10 pressive, sometimes even beautiful. His Letters to Mrs. 
Dunlop are uniformly excellent. 

But we return to his poetry. In addition to its sin- 
cerity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is 
but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing. It 

15 displays itself in his choice of subjects, or rather in his 
indifference as to subjects, and the power he has of 
making all subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, like 

' the ordinary man, is for ever seeking, in external circum- 
stances, the help which can be found only in himself. 

20 In what is familiar and near at hand, he discerns no 
form or comeliness ; home is not poetical, but prosaic ; 
it is in some past, distant, conventional world, that 
poetry resides for him ; were he there and not here, 
were he thus and not so, it would be well with him. 

25 Hence our innumerable host of rose-colored novels and 
iron-mailed epics, with their locality not on the Earth, 
but somewhere nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins 
of the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious 
Saracens in turbans, and copper-colored Chiefs in warn- 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 35 

pum, and so many other truculent figures from the 
heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands 
swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them ! But yet, 
as a great moralist proposed preaching to the men of 
this century, so would we fain preach to the poets, "as 
sermon on the duty of staying at home." Let them be 
sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little 
for them. That form of life has attraction for us, less 
because it is better or nobler than our own, than simply 
because it is different ; and even this attraction must be 10 
of the most transient sort. For will not our own age, 
one day, be an ancient one ; and have as quaint a cos- 
tume as the rest ; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, 
but ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness ? 
Does Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what 15 
passed out of his native Greece, and two centuries be- 
fore he was born ; or because he wrote of what passed 
in God's world, and in the heart of man, which is the 
same after thirty centuries ? Let our poets look to 
this ; is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision 20 
deeper than that of other men ? they have nothing to 
fear, even from the humblest object; is it not so? — 
they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral favor, even 
from the highest. 

The poet, we cannot but think, can never have far to 25 
seek for a subject ; the elements of his art are in him, 
and around him on every hand ; for him the Ideal world 
is not remote from the Actual, but under it and within 
it ; nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it 



36 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world 
around him, the poet is in his place; for here too is 
man's existence, with its infinite longings and small 
acquirings ; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors ; 

5 its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that 
wander through Eternity : and all the mystery of 
brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in 
any age or climate, since man first began to live. Is 
there not the fifth act of a Tragedy, in every death-bed, 

10 though it were a peasant's and a bed of heath ? And 
are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be 
Comedy no longer ? Or are men suddenly grown wise, 
that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be 
cheated of his Farce ? Man's life and nature is, as it 

15 was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an 
eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them ; 
or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is 
a vates, a seer ; a gift of vision has been given him. 
Has life no meanings for him, which another cannot 

20 equally decipher ? then he is no poet, and Delphi itself 
will not make him one. 

In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely 
a great poet, better manifests his capability, better 
proves the truth of his genius, than if he had, by his 

25 own strength, kept the whole Minerva Press going, to 
the end of his literary course. He shows himself at 
least a poet of Nature's own making ; and Nature, after 
all, is still the grand agent in making poets. We often 
hear of this and the other external condition being 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 37 

requisite for the existence of a poet. Sometimes it is 
a certain sort of training ; lie must have studied certain 
things, studied for instance " the elder dramatists," and 
so learned a poetic language ; as if poetry lay in the 
tongue, not in the heart. At other times we are told, 5 
he must be bred in a certain rank, and must be on a 
confidential footing with the higher classes; because, 
above all other things, he must see the world. As to 
seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him little 
difficulty, if he have but an eye to see it with. Without 10 
eyes, indeed, the task might be hard. But happily every 
poet is born in the world, and sees it, with or against 
his will, every day and every hour he lives. The mys- 
terious workmanship of man's heart, the true light and 
the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal them- 15 
selves not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, 
but in every hut and hamlet where men have their 
abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues, 
and all human vices — the passions at once of a Borgia 
and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, 20 
in the consciousness of every individual bosom, that has 
practised honest self-examination ? Truly, this same 
world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we 
look well, as clearly as it ever came to light in Crock- 
foBd/s^pr the Tuileries itself. 25 

y^But sometimes still harder requisitions. are laid on the 
poor aspirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that he should 
have been born two centuries ago; inasmuch as poetry, 
soon after that date, vanished from the earth, and 



38 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

became no longer attainable by men ! Such cobweb 
speculations have, now and then, overhung the field of 
literature ; but they obstruct not the growth of any 
plant there : the Shakspeare or the Burns, unconsciously, 

5 and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes them 
away. Is not every genius an impossibility till he ap- 
pear ? Why do we call him new and original, if we saw 
where his marble was lying, and what fabric he could 
rear from it ? It is not the material but the workman 

10 that is wanting. It is not the dark place that hinders, 
but the dim eye. A Scottish peasant's life was the 
meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet 
in it, and a poet of it ; found it a man's life, and there- 
fore significant to men. A thousand battle-fields remain 

15 unsung ; but the Wounded Hare has not perished with- 
out its memorial ; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us 
from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our 
Halloween had passed and repassed, in rude awe and 
laughter, since the era of the Druids ; but no Theocri- 

20 tus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a Scottish 
Idyl : neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent, 
or Boman Jubilee; but nevertheless, Superstition and 
Hypocrisy, and Fun having been propitious to him, in 
this man's hand it became a poem, instinct with satire, 

25 and genuine comic life. Let but the true poet be given 
us, we repeat -it, place him where and how you will, 
and true poetry will not be wanting. 

Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, 
as we have now attempted to describe it, a certain 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 39 



rugg ed sterling worth pervades whatever Burns has 
written : a virtue, as of green fields and mountain 
breezes, dwells in his poetry ; it is redolent of natural 
life, and hardy, natural men. There is a decisive 
strength in him ; and yet a sweet native gracefulness : 5 
he is tender, and he is vehement, yet without constraint 
or too visible effort ; he melts the heart, or inflames it, 
with a power which seems habitual and familiar to him. 
We see in him the gentleness, the trembling pity of a 
woman, with the deep earnestness, the force and pas- 10 
sionate ardor of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consum- 
ing fire ; as lightning lurks in the drops of the summer 
cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note 
of human feeling : the high and the low, the sad, the 
ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his 15 
"lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit." And observe 
with what a prompt and eager force he grasps his sub- 
ject, be it what it may ! How he fixes, as it were, the 
full image of the matter in his eye ; full and clear in 
every lineament ; and catches the real type and essence 20 
of it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circum- 
stances, no one of which misleads him ! Is it of reason 
— some truth to be discovered ? No sophistry, no vain 
surface-logic detains him ; quick, resolute, unerring, he 
pierces through into the marrow of the question, and 25 
speaks his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be for- 
gotten. Is it of description — some visual object to be 
represented ? No poet of any age or nation is more 
graphic than Burns : the characteristic features disclose 



40 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

themselves to him at a glance; three lines from his 
hand, and we have a likeness. And, in that rough dia- 
lect, in that rude, often awkward metre, so clear, and 
definite a likeness ! It seems a draughtsman working 

5 with a burnt stick ; and yet the burin of a Eetzsch is 
not more expressive or ex-act. 

This clearness of sight we may call the foundation of 
all talent ; for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall 
we know how to place or prize it, in our understanding, 

10 our imagination, our affections ? Yet it is not in itself 
perhaps a very high excellence ; but capable of being 
united indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary 
powers. Homer surpasses all men in this quality : but 
strangely enough, at no great distance below him are 

15 Eichardson and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is 
called a lively mind : and gives no sure indication of the 
higher endowments that may exist along with it. In all 
the three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with 
great garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample, 

20 and lovingly exact ; Homer's fire bursts through, from 
time to time, as if by accident ; but Defoe and Eichard- 
son have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished 
by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his con- 
ceptions. Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with 

25 which he thought, his emphasis of expression may give 
an humble but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered 
sharper sayings than his ; words more memorable, now 
by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigor 
and laconic pith ? A single phrase depicts a whole sub- 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 41 

ject, a whole scene. Our Scottish forefathers in the 
battle-field struggled forward, he says, " red-wat-shod ; " 
giving, in this one word, a full vision of horror and car- 
nage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art ! 

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of 5 
Burns is this vigor of his strictly intellectual percep- 
tions. A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, 
as in his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says 
of him, with some surprise : " All the faculties of 
Burns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally 10 
vigorous ; and his predilection for poetry was rather the 
result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, 
than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of 
composition. From his conversation I should have pro- 
nounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of 15 
ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities." But 
this, if we mistake not, is at all times the very essence 
of a truly poetical endowment. Poetry, except in such 
cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in ex- 
treme sensibility, and a certain vague pervading tune- 20 
fulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which 
can be superadded to the rest or disjoined from them ; 
but rather the result of their general harmony and com- 
pletion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in the Poet, 
are those that exist, with more or less development, in 25 
every human soul : the imagination, which shudders at 
the Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in degree, 
which called that picture into being. How does the poet 
speak to all men, with power, but by being still more a 



42 TUOMAS CARLYLE. 

man than they ? Shakspeare, it has been well 'observed, 
in the planning and completing of his tragedies, has 
shown an Understanding, were it nothing more, which 
might have governed states, or indited a Novum Orga- 

5 num. What Burns's force of understanding may have 
been, we have less means of judgment : for it dwelt 
among the humblest objects, never saw philosophy, 
and never rose, except for short intervals, into the re- 
gion of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indication 

10 remains for us in his works : we discern the brawny 
movement of a gigantic though untutored strength, and 
can understand how, in conversation, his quick, sure in- 
sight into men and things may, as much as aught else 
about him, have amazed the best thinkers of his time 

15 and country. 

But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns 
is fine as well as strong. The more delicate relation of 
things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were 
intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate 

20 and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient ; 
nay, perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the 
most certainly elude it. For this logic works by words, 
and "the highest," it has been said, " cannot be ex- 
pressed in words." We are not without tokens of an 

25 openness for this higher truth also, of a keen though 
uncultivated sense for it, having existed in Burns. Mr. 
Stewart, it will be remembered, " wonders," in the pas- 
sage above quoted, that Burns had formed some distinct 
conception of the " doctrine of association." We rather 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 43 

think that far subtiler things than the doctrine of asso- 
ciation had from of old been familiar to him. Here for 
instance : 

" We know nothing," thus writes he, " or next to noth- 
ing, of the structure of our souls, so we cannot account 5 
for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be 
particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, 
which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordi- 
nary impression. I have some favorite flowers in spring, 
among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the 10 
fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the 
hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with par- 
ticular delight. I never hear the loud solitary whistle 
of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing ca- 
dence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, is 
without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm 
of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what 
can this be owing ? Are we a piece of machinery, which, 
like the iEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of 
the passing accident ; or do these workings argue some- 20 
thing within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself 
partial to such proofs of those awful and important real- 
ities : a God that made all things, man's immaterial and 
immortal nature, and a world of weal or woe beyond 
dea^h and the grave." 25 

Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken 
of as something different from general force and fineness 
of nature, as something partly independent of them. 
The necessities of language probably require this ; but 



44 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

in truth these qualities are not distinct and indepen- 
dent : except in special cases, and from special causes, 
they ever go together. A man of strong understanding 
is generally a man of strong character ; neither is deli- 

5 cacy in the one kind often divided from delicacy in the 
other. No one, at all events, is ignorant that in the 
poetry of Burns, keenness of insight keeps pace with 
keenness of feeling; that his light is not more pervading 
than his zvarmth. He is a man of the most impassioned 

10 temper ; with passions not strong only, but noble, and 
of the sort in which great virtues and great poems take 
their rise. It is reverence, it is Love towards all Nature 
that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and 
makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There is 

15 a true old saying, that " love furthers knowledge : " but, 
above all, it is the living essence of that knowledge 
which makes poets ; the first principle of its existence, 
increase, activity. Of Burns's fervid affection, his gen- 
erous, all-embracing Love, we have spoken already, as 

20 of the grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in 
word and deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It 
were easy to multiply examples. Not man only, but all 
that environs man in the material and moral universe, 
is lovely in his sight: "the hoary hawthorn," the "troop 

25 of gray plover," the " solitary curlew/' are all dear to 
him — all live in this Earth along with him, and to all 
he is knit as in mysterious brotherhood. How touching 
is it, for instance, that, amidst the gloom of personal 
misery, brooding over the wintry desolation without him 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 45 

and within him, he thinks of the " ourie cattle " and 
" silly sheep," and their sufferings in the pitiless storm ! 

" I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war; 5 

Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 

Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 

That in the merry month o 1 spring 

Delighted me to hear thee sing, 10 

What comes o' thee? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy cluttering wing, 

And close thy ee? " 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its " ragged roof and 
chinky wall," has a heart to pity even these ! This is 15 
worth several homilies on Mercy ; for it is the voice of 
Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy ; his 
soul rushes forth into all realms of being ; nothing that 
has existence can be indifferent to him. The very devil 
he cannot hate with right orthodoxy ! 20 

" But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben; 
O wad ye tak a thought and men' ! 
Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, — 

Still hae a stake ; 
I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 25 

Even for your sake!" 

He did not know, probably, that Sterne had been before- 
hand with him. " * He is the father of curses and lies,' 



46 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

said Dr. Slop ; 'and is cursed and damned already.' — ' I 
am sorry for it,' quoth my uncle Toby ! " — "A poet 
without Love, were a physical and metaphysical impos- 
sibility." 

5 Why should we speak of Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace 
bled ; since all know it, from the king to the meanest 
of his subjects ? This dithyrambic was composed on 
horseback ; in riding in the middle of tempests, over the 
wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, 

10 who, observing the poet's looks, forebore to speak, — 
judiciously enough, — for a man composing Bruce's 
Address might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this 
stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through 
the soul of Burns ; but to the external ear, it should 

15 be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. So long as 

there is warm blood in the heart of a Scotchman or 

man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war-ode, 

the best, we believe, that was ever written by any pen. 

Another wild, stormful song, that dwells in onr ear 

20 and mind with a strange tenacity, is Maqjkerson's Fare- 
well. Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself 
that co-operates. For was not this grim Celt, this 
shaggy Northland Cacus, that " lived a life of sturt and 
strife, and died by treacherie," was not he too one of the 

25 Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his 
own remote misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider 
one ? Nay, was there not a touch of grace given him ? 
A fibre of love and softness, of poetry itself, must have 
lived in his savage heart ; for he composed that air the 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 47 

night before his execution; on the wings of that poor 
melody, his better soul would soar away above oblivion, 
pain, and all the ignominy and despair, which, like an 
avalanche, was hurling him to the abyss ! Here, also, 
as at Thebes, and in Pelops' line, was material Fate 5 
matched against man's Free-will ; matched in bitterest 
though obscure duel ; and the ethereal soul sunk not, 
even in its blindness, without a cry which has survived 
it. But who, except Burns, could have given words to 
such a soul — words that we never listen to without a 10 
strange half-barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling ? 



Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he; 
He play'd a spring, and danced it round, 

Below the gallows tree." 15 



/ 



Under a lighter and thinner disgu.se, the same prin- 
ciple of Love, which we have recognized as the great char- 
acteristic of Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally 
manifests itself in the shape of Humor. Everywhere, 
indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth 20 
rolls through the mind of Burns ; he rises to the high, 
and stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to 
all Nature. We speak not of his bold and often irre- 
sistible faculty of caricature ; for this is Drollery rather 
than Humor: but a much 'tenderer sportfulness dwells 25 
in him ; and comes forth, here and there, in evanescent 
and beautiful touches ; as in his Address to the Mouse, 
or the Farmer's Mure, or in his Elegy on Poor Mallie, 



48 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

which last may be reckoned his happiest effort of this 
kind. In these pieces, there are traits of a Humor as 
fine as that of Sterne ; yet altogether different, original, 
peculiar, — the Humor of Burns. 

5 Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other 
kindred qualities of Burns' s poetry, much more might be 
said ; but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we 
must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak 
of his individual writings, adequately, and with any 

10 detail, would lead us far beyond our limits. As already 
hinted, we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict 
critical language, deserving the name of Poems ; they 
are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; 
yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. __2jim 

15 O'Shanter itself, which enjoys so high a favor, does not 
appear to us at all decisively, to come under~lhis last 
category. It is not so much a poem, as a piece of spark- 
ling rhetoric ; the heart and body of the story still lies 
hard and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried 

20 us back, into that dark, earnest wondering age, when the 
tradition was believed, and when it took its rise ; he 
does not attempt, by any new modelling of his supernat- 
ural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord 
of human nature, which once responded to such things ; 

25 and which lives in us too, and will for ever live, though 
silent, or vibrating with far other notes, and to far dif- 
ferent issues. Our German readers will understand us, 
when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the Musaus 
of this tale. Externally it is all green and living ; yet 



ESSAY QN BURNS. 49 

look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. 
The piece does not properly cohere ; the strange chasm 
which yawns in our incredulous imaginations between 
the Ayr public-house and the gate of Tophet, is nowhere 
bridged over, nay, the idea of such a bridge is laughed 5 
at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a 
mere drunken phantasmagoria, painted on ale-vapors, 
and the farce alone has any reality. We do not say 
that Burns should have made much more of this tradi- 
tion ; we rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, 10 
not much was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to 
the deep, varied, genial power displayed in what he has 
actually accomplished : but we find far more " Shak- 
spearian " qualities, as these of Tarn 0' Shanterh&ve been 
fondly named, in many of his other pieces ; nay, we in- 15 
cline to believe, that this latter might have been written, 
all but quite as well, by a man who, in place of genius, 
had only possessed talent. 

Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly 
poetical of all his " poems " is one, which does not appear 20 
in Currie's Edition; but has been often printed before 
and since, under the humble title of The Jolly Beggars. 
The subject truly is among the lowest in nature ; but it 
only the more shows our poet's gift in raising it into the 
domain of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thor- 25 
oughly compacted ; melted together, refined ; and poured 
forth in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, 
airy, and soft of movement ; yet sharp and precise in 
its details ; every face is a portrait : that raucle carlin, 



50 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

that wee Apollo, that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet 
ideal; the scene is at once a dream, and the very Kag- 
castle of "Poosie-Nansie." Farther, it seems in a con- 
siderable degree complete, a real self-supporting Whole, 

5 which is the highest merit in a poem. The blanket of 
the night is drawn asunder for a moment ; in full, ruddy, 
and flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen 
in their boisterous revel ; for the strong pulse of Life 
vindicates its right to gladness even here; and when 

10 the curtain closes, we prolong the action without effort ; 
the next day, as the last, our Caivd and our Ballad- 
monger are singing and soldiering ; their " brats and 
callets" are hawking, begging, cheating; and some other 
night, in new' combinations, they will ring from Fate 

15 another hour of wassail and good cheer. It would be 
strange, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns's writ- 
ings ; we mean to say only, that it seems to us the most 
perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, 
strictly so called. In the Beggar's Opera, in the Beg- 

20 gar's Bush, as other critics have already remarked, there 
is nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals this Can- 
tata ; nothing, as we think, which comes within many 
degrees of it. 
"^A But by far the most finished, complete, and truly 

25 inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be 
found among his Songs. It is here that, although 
through a small aperture, his light shines with the 
least obstruction ; in its highest beauty, and pure sunny 
clearness. The reason may be, that Song is a brief and 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 51 

simple species of composition : and requires nothing so 
much for its perfection as genuine poetic feeling, genuine 
music of heart. The Song has its rules equally with the 
Tragedy ; rules which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, 
in many cases are not so much as felt. We might write 5 
a long essay on the Songs of Burns; which we reckon 
by far the best that Britain has yet produced ; for, in- 
deed, since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we know not 
that, by any other hand, aught truly worth attention 
has been accomplished in this department. True, we 10 
have songs enough " by persons of quality ; " we have 
tawdry, hollow, wine-bred madrigals ; many a rhymed 
" speech " in the flowing and watery vein of Ossorius 
the Portugal Bishop, rich in sonorous words, and, for 
moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a sentimental 15 
sensuality ; all which many persons cease not from en- 
deavoring to sing : though for most part, we fear, the 
music is but from the throat outward, or at best from 
some region far enough short of the Soul ; not in which, 
but in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in 20 
some vaporous debatable land on the outside of the 
Nervous System, most of such madrigals and rhymed 
speeches seem to have originated. With the Songs of 
Burns we must not name these things. Independently 
of the clear, manly, heartfelt sentiment that ever per- 25 
vades his poetry, his Songs are honest in another point 
of view : in form as well as in spirit. They do not affect 
to be set to music ; but they actually and in themselves 
are music ; they have received their life, and fashioned 



52 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

themselves together, in the medium of Harmony, as 
Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The story, the 
feeling, is not detailed, but suggested ; not said, or 
spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence ; but 

5 sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic 
breaks, in warblings not of the voice only, but of the 
whole mind. We consider this to be the essence of a 
song ; and that no songs since the little careless catches, 
and, as it were, drops of song, which Shakspeare has 

10 here and there sprinkled over his plays, fulfil this con- 
dition in nearly the same degree as most of Burns's do. 
Such grace and truth of external movement, too, presup- 
poses in general a corresponding force and truth of sen- 
timent, and inward meaning. The Songs of Burns are 

15 not more perfect in the former quality than in the latter. 
With what tenderness he sings, yet with what vehe- 
mence and entireness ! There is a piercing wail in his 
sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy : he burns with the 
sternest ire, or laughs with the loudest or slyest mirth; 

20 and yet he is sweet and soft, " sweet as the smile when 
fond lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear ! " If 
we farther take into account the immense variety of his 
subjects ; how, from the loud flowing revel in Willie 
brew'd a peck o' Maut, to the still, rapt enthusiasm of 

25 sadness for Mary in Heaven ; from the glad kind greet- 
ing of Auld Langsyne, or the comic archness of Duncan 
Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of Scots, who, hae wV Wallace 
bled, he has found a tone and words for every mood of 
man's heart, — it will seem a small praise if we rank 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 53 

him as the first of all our song-writers ; for we know 
not where to find one worthy of being second to him. 

It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief in- 
fluence as an author will ultimately be found to depend : 
nor, if our Fletcher's aphorism is true, shall we account 5 
this a small influence. " Let me make the songs of a 
people/' said he, " and you shall make its laws." Surely, 
if ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Le- 
gislators, on this ground, it was Burns. His songs are 
already part of the mother tongue, not of Scotland only 10 
but of Britain, and of the millions that in all the ends 
of the earth speak a British language. In hut and hall, 
as the heart unfolds itself in the joy and woe of exist- 
ence, the name, the voice, of that joy and that woe, is the 
name and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly 15 
speaking, perhaps, no British man has so deeply affected 
the thoughts and feelings of so many men as this solitary 
and altogether private individual, with means apparently 
the humblest. 

In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think 20 
that Burns's influence may have been considerable : we 
mean, as exerted specially on the Literature of his coun- 
try, at least on the Literature of Scotland. Among the 
great changes which British, particularly Scottish litera- 
ture, has undergone since that period, one of the greatest 25 
will be found to consist in its remarkable increase of 
nationality. Even the English writers, most popular in 
Burns's time, were little distinguished for their literary 
patriotism, in this its best sense. A certain attenuated 



54 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place of 
the old insular home-feeling ; literature was, as it were, 
without any local environment — was not nourished by 
the affections which spring from a native soil. Our Grays 

5 and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo ; the 
thing written bears no mark of place ; it is not written 
so much for Englishmen, as for men ; or rather, which 
is the inevitable result of this, for certain Generaliza- 
tions which philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is an 

10 exception ; not so Johnson ; the scene of his Rambler is 
little more English than that of his Rasselas. But if 
such was, in some degree, the case with England, it was, 
in the highest degree, the case with Scotland. It fact, 
our Scottish literature had, at that period, a very singu- 

15 lar aspect ; unexampled, so far as we know, except per- 
haps at Geneva, where the same state of matters appears 
still to continue. For a long period after Scotland be- 
came British, we had no literature : at the date when 
Addison and Steele were writing their Spectators, our 

20 good Thomas Boston was writing, with the noblest in- 
tent, but alike in defiance of grammar and philosophy, 
his Fourfold State of Man. Then came the schisms in 
our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our 
Body Politic : Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with 

25 gall enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the 
intellect of the country ; however, it was only obscured, 
not obliterated. Lord Karnes made nearly the first at- 
tempt, and a tolerably clumsy one, at writing English ; 
and, ere long, Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a whole 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 55 

host of followers, attracted hither the e} r es of all Europe. 
And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our " fervid 
genius," there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indi- 
genous ; except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of in- 
tellect, which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes 5 
upbraided with, as a characteristic of our nation. It is 
curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had 
no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English ; our culture 
was almost exclusively French. It was by studying 
Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that Karnes 10 
had trained himself to be a critic and philosopher : it 
was the light of Montesquieu and Mably that guided 
Robertson in his political speculations : Quesnay's lamp 
that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too 
rich a man to borrow ; and perhaps he reacted on the 15 
French more than he was acted on by them : but neither 
had he aught to do with Scotland ; Edinburgh, equally 
with La Fleche, was but the lodging and laboratory, in 
which he not so much morally lived, as metaphysically 
investigated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of wri- 20 
ters, so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, 
to all appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay, of any 
human affection whatever. The French wits of the 
period were as unpatriotic ; but their general deficiency 
in moral principle, not to say their avowed sensuality 25 
and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, render this 
accountable enough. We hope there is a patriotism 
founded on something better than prejudice ; that our 
country may be dear to us, without injury to our phi- 



56 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

losophy ; that in loving and justly prizing all other lands, 
we may prize justly, and yet love before all others, our 
own stern Motherland, and the venerable structure of 
social and moral Life, which Mind has through long 

5' ages been building up for us there. Surely there is nour- 
ishment for the better part of man's heart in all this : 
surely the roots, that have fixed themselves in the very 
core of man's being, may be so cultivated as to grow up 
not into briers, but into roses, in the field of his life ! 

10 Our Scottish sages have no such propensities : the field* 
of their life shows neither briers nor roses ; but only a 
flat, continuous thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all 
questions, from the " Doctrine of Rent," to the " Natu- 
ral History of Religion," are thrashed and sifted with 

15 the same mechanical impartiality ! 

With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, 
it cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or 
rapidly passing away : our chief literary men, whatever 
other faults they may have, no longer live among us 

20 like a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Mis- 
sionaries ; but like natural-born subjects of the soil, 
partaking and sympathizing in all our attachments, 
humors, and habits. Our literature no longer grows in 
water, but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of 

25 the soil and climate. How much of this change may 
be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be 
difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns 
was not to be looked for. But his example, in the fear- 
less adoption of domestic subjects, could not but operate 



ESSAY ON BUENS. 57 

from afar; and certainly in no heart did the love of 
country ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of 
Burns: "a tide of Scottish prejudice," as he modestly 
calls this deep and generous feeling, " had been poured 
along his veins ; and he felt that it would boil there till 5 
the flood-gates shut in eternal rest." It seemed to him, 
as if he could do so little for his country, and yet would 
so gladly have done all. One small province stood open 
for him ; that of Scottish song, and how eagerly he 
entered on it ; how devotedly he labored there ! In his 10 
most toilsome journeyings, this object never quits him ; 
it is the little happy-valley of his careworn heart. In 
the gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches after 
some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices to snatch 
one other name from the oblivion that was covering i.t ! 15 
These were early feelings, and they abode with him to 
the end. 

"a wish, (I mind its power,) 

A wish, that to my latest hour 

Will strongly heave my breast; 20 

That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 

Some useful plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least. 

The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 25 

I turn'd my weeding-clips aside, 
And spared the symbol dear." 

But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, 
which has already detained us too long, Ave cannot but 
think that the Life he willed, and was fated to lead 30 



58 THOMAS CAELYLE. 

among his fellow-men, is both more interesting and in- 
structive than any of his written works. These Poems 
are but like little rhymed fragments scattered here and 
there in the grand unrhymed Romance of his earthly 

5 existence ; and it is only when intercalated in this at 
their proper places, that they attain their full measure 
of significance. And this, too, alas, was but a fragment ! 
The plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched ; some 
columns, porticoes, firm masses of building, stand com- 

10 pleted ; the rest more or less clearly indicated ; with 
many a far-stretching tendency, which only studious 
and friendly eyes can now trace towards the purposed 
termination. For the work is broken off in the middle, 
almost in the beginning ; and rises among us, beautiful 

15 and sad, at once unfinished and a ruin ! If charitable 
judgment was necessary in estimating his poems, and 
justice required that the aim and the manifest power to 
fulfil it must often be accepted for the fulfilment ; much 
more is this the case in regard to his life, the sum and 

20 result of all his endeavors, where his difficulties came 
upon him not in detail only, but in mass ; and so much 
has been left unaccomplished, nay, was mistaken, and 
altogether marred. 

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of 

25 Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and 
manhood ; but only youth : for, to the end, we discern 
no decisive change in the complexion of his character ; 
in his thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were, in 
youth. With all that resoluteness of judgment, that 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 59 

penetrating insight, and singular maturity of intellect- 
ual power, exhibited in his writings, he never attains to 
any clearness regarding himself ; to the last he never 
ascertains his peculiar aim, even with such distinctness 
"as is common among ordinary men, and therefore never 5 
can pursue it with that singleness of will, which insures 
success and some contentment to such men. To the 
last, he wavers between two purposes : glorying in his 
talent, like a true poet, he yet cannot consent to make 
this his chief and sole glory, and to follow it as the 10 
one thing needful, through poverty or riches, through 
good or evil report. Another far meaner ambition still 
cleaves to him ; he must dream and struggle about a cer- 
tain " Rock of Independence ; " which, natural and even 
admirable as it might be, was still but a warring with 15 
the world, on the comparatively insignificant ground of 
his being more or less completely supplied with money, 
than others ; of his standing at a higher, or at a lower 
altitude in general estimation, than others. For the 
world still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed 20 
colors ; he expects from it what it cannot give to any 
man ; seeks for contentment, not within himself, in 
action and wise effort, but from without, in the kind- 
ness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecu- 
niary ease. He would be happy, not actively and in 25 
himself, but passively, and from some ideal cornuco- 
pia of Enjoyments, not earned by his own labor, but 
showered on him by the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, 
like a young man, he cannot steady himself for any 



60 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

fixed or systematic pursuit, but swerves to and fro, be- 
tween passionate hope, and remorseful disappointment : 
rushing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, he sur- 
mounts or breaks asunder many a barrier ; travels, nay, 

5 advances far, but advancing only under uncertain guid- 
ance, is ever and anon turned from his path : and to the 
last, cannot reach the only true happiness of a man, 
that of clear, decided Activity in the sphere for which 
by nature and circumstances he has been fitted and 

10 appointed. 

We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns : 
nay, perhaps, they but interest us the more in his 
favor. This blessing is not given soonest to the best ; 
but rather, it is often the greatest minds that are latest 

15 in obtaining it ; for where most is to be developed, most 
time may be required to develop it. A complex con- 
dition had been assigned him from without, as complex 
a condition from within : no " pre-established harmony " 
existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel and the empy- 

20 rean soul of Robert Burns ; it was not wonderful, there- 
fore, that the adjustment between them should have 
been long postponed, and his arm long cumbered, and 
his sight confused, in so vast and discordant an econ- 
omy, as he had been appointed steward over. Byron 

25 was, at his death, but a year younger than Burns ; and 
through life, as it might have appeared, far more simply 
situated ; yet in him, too, we can trace no such adjust- 
ment, no such moral manhood ; but at best, and only a 
little before his end, the beginning of what seemed 

30 such. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 61 

By much the most striking incident in Burns's Life is 
his journey to Edinburgh ; but perhaps a still more im- 
portant one is his residence at Irvine, so early as in his 
twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been poor and 
toil worn ; but otherwise not ungenial, and, with all its 5 
distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parentage, de- 
ducting outward circumstances, he had every reason 
to reckon himself fortunate ; his father was a man of 
thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the best of 
our peasants are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, 10 
and, what __is far better and rarer, open-minded for more ; 
a man with a keen insight, and devout heart ; reverent 
towards God, friendly therefore at once, and fearless 
towards all that God has made ; in one word, though 
but a hard-handed peasant, a complete and fully un- 15 
folded Man. Such a father is seldom found in any 
rank in society ; and was worth descending far in society 
to seek. Unfortunately, he was very poor ; had he been 
even a little richer, almost ever so little, the whole 
might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events turn 20 
on a straw ; the crossing of a brook decides the conquest 
of the world. Had this William Burns's small seven 
acres of nursery ground anywise prospered, the boy 
Robert had been sent to school; had struggled forward, 
as so many weaker men do, to some university ; come 25 
forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular well- 
trained intellectual workman, and changed the whole 
course of British Literature, — for it lay in him to have 
done this! But the nursery did not prosper'; poverty 



62 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

sank his whole family below the help of even our cheap 
school-system : Burns remained a hard-worked plough- 
boy, and British literature took its own course. Never- 
theless, even in this rugged scene, there is much to 

5 nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his brother, and 
for his father and mother, whom he loves, and would 
fain shield from want. Wisdom is not banished from 
their poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling : the 
solemn words, Let us worship God, are heard there from 

10 a " priest-like father ; " if threatenings of unjust men 
throw mother and children into tears, these are tears 
not of grief only, but of holiest affection ; every heart 
in that humble group feels itself the closer knit to every 
other ; in their hard warfare they are there together, a 

15 " little band of brethren." Neither are such tears, and 
the deep beauty that dwells in them, their only portion. 
Light visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all living: 
there is a force, too, in this youth, that enables him to 
trample on misfortune ; nay, to bind it under his feet 

20 to make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humor 
of character has been given him ; and so the thick- 
coming shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly 
irony, and in their closest pressure he bates no jot of 
heart or hope. Vague yearnings of ambition fail not, 

25 as he grows up ; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities 
around him ; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, 
in many-colored splendor and gloom ; and the auroral 
light of first love is gilding his horizon, and the music of 
song is on his path ; and so he walks 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 



" in glory and in joy, 



Behind his plough, upon the mountain side!" 

We know, from the best evidence, that up to this date, 
Burns was happy j nay, that he was the gayest, bright- 
est, most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in the 5 
world ; more so even than he ever afterwards appeared. 
Bat now at this early age, he quits the paternal roof ; 
goes forth into looser, louder, more exciting society; 
and becomes initiated in those dissipations, those vices, 
which a certain class of philosophers have asserted to be 10 
a natural preparative for entering on active life ; a kind of 
mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it were, necessitated 
to steep, and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real 
toga of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dis- 
pute much with this class of philosophers ; we hope they 15 
are mistaken ; for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at 
all stages of life, and are always such indifferent company, 
that it seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced and 
fated not only to meet, but to yield to them ; and even 
serve for a term in their leprous armada. We hope it 20 
is not so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the 
training one receives in this service, but only our deter- 
mining to desert from it, that fits for true manly Action. 
We become men, not after we have been dissipated, and 
disappointed in the chase of false pleasure ; but after we 25 
have ascertained, in any way, what impassable barriers 
hem us in through this life ; how mad it is to hope for 
contentment to our infinite soul from the gifts of this 



04 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

extremely finite world ! that a man must be sufficient 
for himself ; and that " for suffering and enduring there 
is no remedy but striving and doing." Manhood begins 
when we have in any way made truce with Necessity ; 

5 begins, at all events, when we have surrendered to Ne- 
cessity, as the most part only do ; but begins joyfully 
and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to 
Necessity ; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and 
felt that in Necessity we are free. Surely, such lessons 

10 as this last, which, in one shape or other, is the grand 
lesson for every mortal man, are better learned from the 
lips of a devout mother, in the looks and actions of a 
devout father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than 
in collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, attracting 

15 us to shipwreck us when the heart is grown hard, and 
may be broken before it will become contrite ! Had 
Burns continued to learn this, as he was already learning 
it, in his father's cottage, he would have learned it fully, 
which he never did, — and been caved many a lasting 

20 aberration, many a bitter hour and year of remorseful 
sorrow. 

It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import 
in Burns's history, that at this time too he became in- 
volved in the religious quarrels of his district ; that he 

25 was enlisted and feasted, as the fighting man of the 
New-Light Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable war- 
fare. At the tables of these free-minded clergy, he 
learned much more than was needful for him. Such 
liberal ridicule of fanaticism awakened in his mind 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 65 

scruples about Keligion itself ; and a whole world of 
Doubts, which it required quite another set of conjurers 
than these men to exorcise. We do not say that such 
an intellect as his could have escaped similar doubts, at 
some period of his history ; or even that he could, at a 5 
later period, have come through them altogether victori- 
ous and unharmed : but it seems peculiarly unfortunate 
that this time, above all others, should have been fixed 
for the encounter. For now, with principles assailed 
by evil example from without, by " passions raging like 10 
demons " from within, he had little need of sceptical 
misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, 
or to cut off his retreat if he were already defeated. 
He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind is at vari- 
ance with itself ; the old divinity no longer presides 15 
there ; but wild Desires and wild Eepentance alternately 
oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed himself 
before the world ; his character for sobriety, dear to a 
Scottish peasant, as few corrupted worldlings can even 
conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men ; and his only 20 
refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, 
and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation 
now gathers over him, broken only by the red light- 
nings of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is 
blasted asunder ; for now not only his character, but his 25 
personal liberty, is to be lost ; men and Fortune are 
leagued for his hurt ; " hungry Ruin has him in the 
wind." He sees no escape but the saddest of all : exile 
from his loved country, to a country in every sense 



bb THOMAS CABLYLE. 

inhospitable and abhorrent to him. While the "gloomy 
night is gathering fast," in mental storm and solitude, 
as well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell to 
Scotland : 

5 "Farewell, my friends, farewell, my foes! 

My peace with these, my love with those: 
The bursting tears my heart declare; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr!" 

Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods ; but still 

10 a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is in- 
vited to Edinburgh ; hastens thither with anticipating 
heart ; is welcomed as in triumph, and with universal 
blandishment and acclamation ; whatever is wisest, 
whatever is greatest, or loveliest there, gathers round 

15 him, to gaze on his face, to show him honor, sympathy, 
affection. Burns's appearance among the sages and 
nobles of Edinburgh, must be regarded as one of the 
most singular phenomena in modern Literature ; al- 
most like the appearance of some Napoleon among the 

20 crowned sovereigns of modern Politics. For it is no- 
wise as a " mockery king," set there by favor, tran- 
siently, and for a purpose, that he will let himself be 
treated ; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sudden 
elevation turns his too weak head ; but he stands there 

25 on his own basis ; cool, unastonished, holding his equal 
rank from Nature herself ; putting forth no claim which 
there is not strength in him, as well as about him, to 
vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations 
on this point : 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 67 

"It needs no effort of imagination," says he, "to con- 
ceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars 
(almost all either clergymen or professors) must have 
been, in the presence of this big-boned, black-browed, 
brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who, hav- 5 
ing forced his way among them from the plough-tail, at 
a single stride, manifested in the whole strain of his 
bearing and conversation, a most thorough conviction, 
that in the society of the most eminent men of his na- 
tion, he was exactly where he was entitled to be ; hardly 10 
deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional 
symptom of being flattered by their notice ; by turns 
calmly measured himself against the most cultivated 
understandings of his time in discussion ; overpowered 
the bon mots of the most celebrated convivialists by 15 
broad floods of merriment, impregnated with all the 
burning life of genius ; astounded bosoms habitually 
enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social reserve, by 
compelling them to tremble, — nay, to tremble visibly, 
— beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos ; and all 20 
this without indicating the smallest willingness to be 
ranked among those professional ministers of excite- 
ment, who are content to be paid in money and smiles 
for doing what the spectators and auditors would be 
ashamed of doing in their own persons, even if they 2d* 
had the power of doing it ; and last, and probably worst 
of all, who was known to be in the habit of enlivening 
societies which they would have scorned to approach, 
still more frequently than their own, with eloquence no 



68 THOMAS CARLYLE 

less magnificent; with wit in all likelihood still more 
daring ; often enough as the superiors whom he fronted 
without alarm might have guessed from the beginning, 
and had, ere long, no occasion to guess, with wit pointed 

5 at themselves." 

The farther we remove from this scene, the more sin- 
gular will it seem to us : details of the exterior aspect 
of it are already full of interest. Most readers recollect 
Mr. Walker's personal interviews with Burns as among 

10 the best passages of his Narrative ; a time will come 
when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight 
though it is, will also be precious. 

" As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, " I may truly say 
Virgilium vidi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, 

15 when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and 
feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and 
would have given the world to know him : but I had 
very little acquaintance with any literary people ; . and 
still less with the gentry of the west country, the two 

20 sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson 
was at that time a clerk of my father's. He knew 
Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to din- 
ner, but had no opportunity to keep his word ; otherwise 
I might have seen more of this distinguished man. As 

25 it was, I saw him one day at the late venerable Profes- 
sor Ferguson's, where there were several gentlemen of 
literary reputation, among whom I remember the cele- 
brated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of course, we youngsters 
sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I re- 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 69 

member, which was remarkable in Burns's manner, was 
the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, 
representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog 
sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow, 
with a child in her arms. These lines were written 5 
beneath : 

'Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain: 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew; 10 

Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears.' 

" Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather 
by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actu- 
ally shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it 15 
chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they 
occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by 
the unpromising title of The Justice of Peace. I whis- 
pered my information to a friend present, he mentioned 
it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, 20 
which, though of mere civility, I then received and still 
recollect with very great pleasure. 

" His person was strong and robust ; his manners rus- 
tic, not clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and sim- 
plicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from 25 
one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His fea- 
tures are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture : but to 
me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if 



TO THOMAS CARLYLE. 

seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more 
massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I should 
have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for 
a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, 

5 i.e. none of your modern agriculturists who keep labor- 
ers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held 
his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense 
and shrewdness in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I 
think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. 

10 It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say 
literally glowed} when he spoke with feeling or interest. 
I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I 
have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His 
conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without 

15 the slightest presumption. Among the men who were 
the most learned of their time and country, he expressed 
himself with perfect firmness, but without the least in- 
trusive forwardness ; and when he differed in opinion, 
he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same 

20 time with modesty. I do not remember any part of his 
conversation distinctly enough to be quoted ; nor did I 
ever see him again, except in the street, where he did 
not recognize me, as I could not expect he should. He 
was much caressed in Edinburgh : but (considering what 

25 literary emoluments have been since his day) the efforts 
made for his relief were extremely trifling. 

"I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought 
Burns's acquaintance with English poetry was rather 
limited ; and also, that having twenty times the abilities 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 71 

of Allan Earn say and of Fergusson, he talked of them 
with too much humility as his models : there was doubt- 
less national predilection in his estimate. 

" This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only 
to add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. He 5 
was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the 
laird. I do not speak in malam partem, when I say, I 
never saw a man in company with his superiors in sta- 
tion or information more perfectly free from either the 
reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, 10 
but did not observe it, that his address to females was 
extremely deferential, and always with a turn either to 
the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention 
particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon 
remark this. I do not know any thing I can add to 15 
these recollections of forty years since." 

The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of 
favor ; the calm, unaffected, manly manner, in which 
he not only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly 
been regarded as the best proof that could be given of 20 
his real vigor and integrity of mind. A little natural 
vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, some 
glimmerings of affectation, at least some fear of being 
thought affected, we could have pardoned in almost any 
man ; but no such indication is to be traced here. In 25 
his unexampled situation the young peasant is not a 
moment perplexed ; so many strange lights do not con- 
fuse him, do not lead him astray. Nevertheless, we 
cannot but perceive that this winter did him great and 



72 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

lasting injury. A somewhat clearer knowledge of men's 
affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did afford him : 
but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal arrangements 
in their social destiny it also left with him. He had 

5 seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful 
are born to play their parts ; nay, had himself stood in 
the midst of it ; and he felt more bitterly than ever, 
that here he was but a looker-on, and had no part or lot 
in that splendid game. From this time a jealous, indig- 

10 nant fear of social degradation takes possession of him ; 
and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, his private 
contentment, and his feelings towards his richer fel- 
lows. It was clear enough to Burns that he had talent 
enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could 

15 he but have rightly willed this ; it was clear also that he 
willed something far different, and therefore could not 
make one. Unhappy it was that he had not power to 
choose the one, and reject the other; but must halt for 
ever between two opinions, two objects ; making ham- 

20 pered advancement towards either. But so is it with 
many men : we " long for the merchandise, yet would 
fain keep the price ; " and so stand chaffering with 
Fate in vexatious altercation, till the Night come, and 
our fair is over ! 

25 The Edinburgh learned of that period were in general 
more noted for clearness of head than for warmth of 
heart: with the exception of the good old Blacklock, 
whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one among them 
seems to have looked at Burns with any true sympathy, 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 73 

or indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious 
tli ing. By the great, also, he is treated in the customary 
fashion ; entertained at their tables, and dismissed : 
certain modica of pudding and praise are, from time to 
time, gladly exchanged for the fascination of his pres- 5 
ence ; which exchange once effected, the bargain is fin- 
ished, and each party goes his several way. At the end 
of this strange season, Burns gloomily sums up his gains 
and losses, and meditates on the chaotic future. In 
money he is somewhat richer ; in fame and the show of 10 
happiness, infinitely richer ; but in the substance of it, 
as poor as ever. Nay, poorer, for his heart is now mad- 
dened still more with the fever of mere worldly Ambi- 
tion : and through long years the disease will rack him 
with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength 15 
for all true and nobler aims. 

What Burns was next to do or avoid ; how a man so 
circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his true 
advantage, might at this point of time have been a ques- 
tion for the wisest : and it was a question which he was 20 
left altogether to answer for himself : of his learned or 
rich patrons it had not struck any individual to turn a 
thought on this so trivial matter. Without claiming for 
Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that 
his Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very 25 
unreasonable one ; and that we should be at a loss, even 
now, to suggest one decidedly better. Some of his ad- 
mirers, indeed, are scandalized at his ever resolving to 
gauge ; and would have had him apparently lie still at the 



74 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

pool, till the spirit of Patronage should stir the waters, 
and then heal with one plunge all his worldly sorrows ! 
We fear such counsellors knew but little of Burn^ ; and 
did not consider that happiness might in all cases be 

5 cheaply had by waiting for the fulfilment of golden 
dreams, were it not that in the interim the dreamer 
must die of hunger. It reflects credit on the manliness 
and sound sense of Burns, that he felt so early on what 
ground he was standing ; and preferred self-help, on the 

10 humblest scale, to dependence and inaction, though with 
hope of far more splendid possibilities. But even these 
possibilities were not rejected in his scheme : he might 
expect, if it chanced that he had any friend, to rise, in 
no long period, into something even like opulence and 

15 leisure ; while again, if it chanced that he had no friend, 
he could still live in security ; and for the rest, he " did 
not intend to borrow honor from any profession." We 
think, then, that his plan was honest and well calculated : 
all turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it failed ; yet 

20 not, we believe, from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, 
after all, it was no failure of external means, but of in- 
ternal, that overtook Burns. His was no bankruptcy 
of the purse, but of the soul ; to his last day, he owed 
no man any thing. 

25 Meanwhile he begins well ; with two good and wise 
actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from a 
man whose income had lately been seven pounds a year, 
was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. Gener- 
ous also, and worthy of him, was his treatment of the 



ESSAY OX BURNS. 75 

woman whose life's welfare now depended on his pleas- 
ure. A friendly observer might have hoped serene days 
for him : his mind is on the true road to peace with it- 
self : what clearness he still wants will be given as he 
proceeds ; for the best teacher of duties, that still lie 5 
dim to us, is the Practice of those we see, and have at 
hand. Had the " patrons of genius," who could give him 
nothing, but taken nothing from him, at least nothing 
more ! — the wounds of his heart would have healed, 
vulgar ambition would have died away. Toil and Fru- 10 
gality would have been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with 
them, and poetry would have shone through them as of 
old ; and in her clear ethereal light, which was his own 
by birth-right, he might have looked down on his earthly 
destiny, and all its obstructions, not with patience only, 15 
but with love. 

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Pic- 
turesque tourists, 1 all manner of fashionable danglers 



1 There is one little sketch by certain "English gentlemen" of 
this class, which, though adopted in Currie's Narrative, and since 20 
then repeated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible dis- 
position to regard as imaginary: "On a rock that projected into the 
stream they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appear- 
ance. He had a cap made of fox-skin on his head, a loose great- 
coat fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous 25 
Highland broad-sword. It was Burns." Now, we rather think, it 
was not Burns. For, to say nothing of the fox-skin cap, loose and 
quite Hibernian watch-coat with the belt, what are we to make of 
this " enormous Highland broad-sword " depending from him? More 
especially, as there is no word of parish constables on the outlook to 30 
see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff, 



76 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

after literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial 
Maecenases, hovered round him in his retreat ; and his 
good as well as his weak qualities secured them influ- 
ence over him. He was flattered by their notice ; and 

5 his warm social nature made it impossible for him to 
shake them off, and hold on his way apart from them. 
These men, as we believe, were proximately the means 
of his ruin. Not that they meant him any ill ; they 
only meant themselves a little good ; if he suffered 

10 harm, let him look to it ! But they wasted his precious 
time and his precious talent ; they disturbed his com- 
posure, broke down his returning habits of temperance 
and assiduous contented exertion. Their pampering was 
baneful to him • their cruelty, which soon followed, was 

15 equally baneful. The old grudge against Fortune's in- 
equality awoke with new bitterness in their neighbor- 
hood, and Burns had no retreat but to the " Eock of 
Independence," which is but an air-castle, after all, that 
looks well at a distance, but will screen no one from 

20 real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excitement, 
exasperated alternately by contempt of others, and con- 
tempt of himself, Burns was no longer regaining his 
peace of mind, but fast losing it for ever. There was a 
h#llowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did 

25 not now approve what he was doing. 

Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless 

or that of the puhlic ! Burns, of all men, had the least tendency to 
seek for distinction, either in his own eyes, or those of others, by such 
poor mummeries. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 77 

remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true load- 
star, a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay, with Famine if 
it must be so, was too often altogether hidden from his 
eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, where, without some 
such guide, there was no right steering. Meteors of 5 
French Politics rise before him, but these were not his 
stars. An accident this, which hastened, but did not 
originate, his worst distresses. In the mad contentions 
of that time, he comes in collision with certain official 
Superiors ; is wounded by them ; cruelly lacerated, we 10 
should say, could a dead mechanical implement, in any 
case, be called cruel : and shrinks, in indignant pain, 
into deeper self-seclusion, into gloomier moodiness than 
ever. His life has now lost its unity : it is a life of 
fragments ; led with little aim, beyond the melancholy 15 
one of securing its own continuance — in fits of wild 
false joy, when such offered, and of black despondency 
when they passed away. His character before the world 
begins to suffer : calumny is busy with him ; for a mis- 
erable man makes more enemies than friends. Some 20 
faults he has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes ; 
but deep criminality is what he stands accused of, and 
they that are not without sin, cast the first stone at him ! 
For is he not a well-wisher of the French Revolution, 
a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty of all ? 25 
These accusations, political and moral, it has since ap- 
peared, were false enough ; but the world hesitated 
little to credit them. Nay, his convivial Maecenases 
themselves were not the last to do it. There is reason 



78 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

to believe that, in his later years, the Dumfries Aris- 
tocracy had partly withdrawn themselves from Burns, 
as from a tainted person, no longer worthy of their 
acquaintance. That painful class, stationed, in all pro- 

5 vincial cities, behind the outmost breastwork of Gentility, 
there to stand siege and do battle against the intrusion 
of Grocerdom, and Grazierdom, had actually seen dis- 
honor in the society of Burns, and branded him with 
their veto ; had, as we vulgarly say, cut him ! We find 

10 one passage in this work of Mr. Lockhart's, which will 
not out of our thoughts : 

" A gentleman of that country, whose name I have 
already more than once had occasion to refer to, has 
often told me that he was seldom more grieved, than 

15 when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening 
about this time to attend a country ball, 'he saw Burns 
walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street 
of the town, while the opposite side was gay with suc- 
cessive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn to- 

20 gether for the festivities of the night, not one of whom 
appeared willing to recognize him. The horseman dis- 
mounted, and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to 
cross the street, said : ' Nay, nay, my young friend, 
that's all over now ; ' and quoted, after a pause, some 

25 verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad : 

* His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 
His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new ; 
But now he lets' t wear ony way it will hing, 
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 



ESSAY OX BURNS. 79 

O were we young, as we ance hae been, 

We sud hae been galloping down on yon green, 

And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 

And werena my heart light I wad die.'' 

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on 5 
certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, immediately 
after reciting these verses, assumed the sprightliness of 
his most pleasing manner ; and, taking his young friend 
home with him, entertained him very agreeably till the 
hour of the ball arrived." 10 

Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps " where 
bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart," l and 
that most of these fair dames and frizzled gentlemen 
already lie at his side, where the breastwork of gentility 
is quite thrown down, — who would not sigh over the 15 
thin , delusions and foolish toys that divide heart from 
heart, and make man unmerciful to his brother ! 
i It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns 
would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy 
of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody ; not the 20 
soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, 
was now sweeping over the strings. And yet w 7 hat har- 
mony was in him, what music even in his discords ! 
How the wild tones had a charm for the simplest and 
the wisest; and all men felt and knew that here also 25 
was one of the Gifted ! " If he entered an inn at mid- 



1 Ubi szeva indignatio cor idterius lacerare nequit. — Swift's 
Epitaph. 



80 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

night, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his 
arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret ; and ere 
ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests 
were assembled ! " Some brief, pure moments of poetic 
5 life were yet appointed him, in the composition of his 
Songs. We can understand how he grasped at this 
employment ; and how, too, he spurned at all other re- 
ward for it but what the labor itself brought him. For 
the soul of Burns, though scathed and marred, was yet 
10 living in its full moral strength, though sharply con- 
scious of its errors and abasement : and here, in his 
destitution and degradation, was one act of seeming 
nobleness and self-devotedness left even for him to per- 
form. He felt, too, that with all the " thoughtless foi- 
ls lies " that had " laid him low," the world was unjust and 
cruel to him ; and he silently appealed to another and 
calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, 
would he strive for the glory of his country ; so he cast 
from him the poor sixpence a-day, and served zealously 
20 as a volunteer. Let us not grudge him this last luxury 
of his existence ; let him not have appealed to us in 
vain ! The money was not necessary to him ; he strug- 
gled through without it ; long since, these guineas would 
have been gone, and now the high-mindedness of refusing 
25 them will plead for him in all hearts for ever. 

We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life ; 
for matters had now taken such a shape with him as 
could not long continue. If improvement was not to 
be looked for, Nature could only for a limited time 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 81 

maintain this dark and maddening warfare against the 
world and itself. We are not medically informed 
whether any continuance of years was, at this period, 
probable for Burns ; whether his death is to be looked 
on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as the 5 
natural consequence of the long series of events that 
had preceded. The latter seems to be the likelier 
opinion; and yet it is by no means a certain one. At 
all events, as we have said, some change could not be 
very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems to 10 
us, were open for Burns : clear poetical activity, mad- 
ness, or death. The first, with longer life, was still 
possible, though not probable ; for physical causes were 
beginning to be concerned in it : and yet Burns had an 
iron resolution ; could he but have seen and felt, that 15 
not only his highest glory, but his first duty, and the 
true medicine for all his woes, lay here. The second 
was still less probable ; for his mind was ever among 
the clearest and firmest. So the milder third gate was 
opened for him : and he passed, not softly, yet speedily, 20 
into that still country, where the hail-storms and fire- 
showers do not reach, and the heaviest-laden wayfarer 
at length lays down his load! 

Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he 
sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise 25 
sympathy, generous minds have sometimes figured to 
themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much might 
have been done for him ; that by counsel, true affection, 
and friendly ministrations, he might have been saved to 



82 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

himself and the world. We question whether there is 
not more tenderness of heart than soundness of judg- 
ment in these suggestions. It seems dubious to us 
whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent individual, 

5 could have lent Burns any effectual help. Counsel,, 
which seldom profits any one, he did not need ; in his 
understanding, he knew the right from the wrong, as 
well perhaps as any man ever did ; but the persuasion, 
which would have availed him, lies not so much in the 

10 head, as in the heart, where no argument or expostula- 
tion could have assisted much to implant it. As to 
money again, we do not really believe that this was his 
essential want ; or well see how any private man could, 
even presupposing Burns's consent, have bestowed on 

15 him an independent fortune, with much prospect of deci- 
sive advantage. It is a mortifying truth, that two men 
in any rank of society could hardly be found virtuous 
enough to give money, and to take it, as a necessary gift, 
without injury to the moral entireness of one or both. 

20 But so stands the fact: friendship, in the old heroic 
sense of that term, no longer exists ; except in the cases 
of kindred or other legal affinity ; it is in reality no 
longer expected, or recognized as a virtue among men. A 
close observer of manners has pronounced " Patronage," 

25 that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be 
" twice cursed ; " cursing him that gives, and him that 
takes ! And thus, in regard to outward matters also, it 
has become the rule, as in regard to inward it always 
was and must be the rule, that no one shall look for 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 83 

effectual help to another ; but that each shall rest con- 
tented with what help he can afford himself. Such, we 
say, is the principle of modern Honor ; naturally enough 
growing out of that sentiment of Pride, which we incul- 
cate and encourage as the basis of our whole social mo- 5 
rality. Many a poet has been poorer than Burns ; but no 
one was ever prouder : and we may question, whether, 
without great precautions, even a pension from Royalty 
would not have galled and encumbered, more than ac- 
tually assisted him. 10 

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with an- 
other class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher 
ranks among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish 
neglect of him. We have already stated our doubts 
whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, 15 
would have been accepted, or could have proved very 
effectual. We shall readily admit, however, that much 
was to be done for Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow 
might have been warded from his bosom ; many an en- 
tanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand of the 20 
powerful ; and light and heat shed on him from high 
places, would have made his humble atmosphere more 
genial ; and the softest heart then breathing might have 
lived and died with some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall 
grant further, and for Burns it is granting much, that 25 
with all his pride, he would have thanked, even with 
exaggerated gratitude, any one who had cordially be- 
friended him : patronage, unless once cursed, needed not 
to have been twice so. At all events, the poor promotion 



84 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

he desired in his calling might have been granted : it 
was his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other 
to be of service. All this it might have been a luxury, 
nay, it was a duty, for our nobility to have done. ~No 

5 part of all this, however, did any of them do; or appar- 
ently attempt, or wish to do ; so much is granted against 
them. But what then is the amount of their blame ? 
Simply that they were men of the world, and walked by 
the principles of such men ; that they treated Burns, as 

10 other nobles and other commoners had done other poets ; 
as the English did Shakspeare ; as King Charles and his 
cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip and his Grandees 
did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of thorns ? or 
shall we cut down our thorns for yielding only a fence, 

15 and haws ? How, indeed, could the " nobility and gen- 
try of his native land " hold out any help to this " Scot- 
tish Bard, proud of his name and country ? " Were the 
nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help them- 
selves ? Had they not their game to preserve ; their 

20 borough interests to strengthen ; dinners, therefore, of 
various kinds to eat and give ? Were their means more 
than adequate to all this business, or less than adequate ? 
Less than adequate in general : few of them in reality 
were richer than Burns; many of them were poorer; 

25 for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with 
thumbscrews, from the hard hand ; and, in their need 
of guineas, to forget their duty of mercy ; which Burns 
was never reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. 
The game they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate 



ESSAY ON BUEJSfS. 85 

and gave, the borough interests they strengthened, the 
little Babylons they severally builded by the glory of 
their might, are all melted, or melting back into the 
primeval Chaos, as man's merely selfish endeavors are 
fated to do : and here was an action extending, in virtue 5 
of its worldly influence, we may say, through all time ; 
in virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, being im- 
mortal as the Spirit of Goodness itself ; this action was 
offered them to do, and light was not given them to do 
it. Let us pity and forgive them. But, better than 10 
pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human suffering did 
not end with the life of Burns ; neither was the solemn 
mandate, " Love one another, bear one another's bur- 
dens," given to the rich only, but to all men. True, we 
shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or 15 
our pity : but celestial natures, groaning under the far- 
dels of a weary life, we shall still find ; and that wretch- 
edness which Fate has rendered voiceless and tuneless, is 
not the least wretched, but the most. 

Still we do not think that the blame of Burns's fail- 20 
ure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to 
us, treated him with more, rather than with less kind- 
ness, than it usually shows to such men. It has ever, 
we fear, shown but small favor to its Teachers ; hunger 
and nakedness, perils and reviling, the prison, the cross, 25 
the poison-chalice, have, in most times and countries, 
been the market-place it has offered for Wisdom, the wel- 
come with which it has greeted those who have come to 
enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and the 



86 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

Christian Apostles belong to old days; but the world's 
Martyrology was not completed with these. Roger 
Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso 
pines in the cell of a mad-house, Camoens dies begging 

5 on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so " persecuted 
they the Prophets," not in Judea only, but in all places 
where men have been. We reckon that every poet of 
Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to 
his age ; that he has no right therefore to expect great 

10 kindness from it, but rather is bound to do it great 
kindness ; that Burns, in particular, experienced fully 
the usual proportion of the world's goodness ; and that 
the blame of his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly 
with the world. 

15 Where then does it lie ? We are forced to answer : 
With himself ; it is his inward, not his outward misfor- 
tunes, that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is 
it otherwise ; seldom is a life morally wrecked, but the 
grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some 

20 want less of good fortune than of good guidance. Na- 
ture fashions no creature without implanting in it the 
strength needful for its action and duration ; least of all 
does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the 
poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is in the 

25 power of any external circumstances utterly to ruin 
the mind of a man ; nay, if proper wisdom be given him, 
even so much as to affect its essential health and beauty. 
The sternest sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is 
Death ; nothing more can lie in the cup of human woe : 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 87 

yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed over Death, 
and led it captive ; converting its physical victory into 
a moral victory for themselves, into a seal and immortal 
consecration for all that their past life had achieved. 
What has been done, may be done again 5 nay, it is but 5 
the degree and not the kind of such heroism that differs 
in different seasons ; for without some portion of this 
spirit, not of boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, 
of Self-denial, in all its forms, no good man, in any scene 
or time, has ever attained to be good. 10 

We have already stated the error of Burns ; and 
mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was the 
want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his 
aims ; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union 
the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, 15 
which is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable 
nature. Burns was nothing wholly, and Burns could be 
nothing, no man formed as he was can be any thing, by 
halves. The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded, popular 
verse-monger, or poetical Restaurateur, but of a true 20 
Poet and Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, 
had been given him : and he fell in an age, not of hero- 
ism and religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and trivi- 
ality, when true Nobleness was little understood, and its 
place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren 25 
and unfruitful principle of Pride. The influences of that 
age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of 
his highly untoward situation, made it more than usu- 
ally difficult for him to repel or resist ; the better spirit 



88 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

that was within him ever sternly demanded its rights, 
its supremacy ; he spent his life in endeavoring to recon- 
cile these two ; and lost it, as he must have lost it, with- 
out reconciling them here. 

5 Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue poor, 
for he would not endeavor to be otherwise : this it had 
been well could he have once for all admitted, and con- 
sidered as finally settled. He was poor, truly ; but hun- 
dreds even of his own class and order of minds have 

10 been poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it : 
nay, his own father had a far sorer battle with ungrate- 
ful destiny than his was ; and he did not yield to it, but 
died courageously warring, and to all moral intents pre- 
vailing, against it. True, Burns had little means, had 

15 even little time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vo- 
cation ; but so much the more precious was what little 
he had. In all these external respects* his case was 
hard ; but very far from the hardest. Poverty, inces- 
sant drudgery, and much worse evils, it has often been 

20 the lot of poets and wise men to strive with, and their 
glory to conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor ; and 
wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding, shelter- 
ing himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at 
his ease, when he composed Paradise Lost ? Not only 

25 low, but fallen from a height ; not only poor, but impov- 
erished ; in darkness and with dangers compassed round, 
he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though 
few. Did not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed sol- 
dier, and in prison ? Nay, was not the Araucana, which 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 89 

Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written without even 
the aid of paper ; on scraps of leather, as the stout 
fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that 
wild warfare ? 

And what then had these men, which Burns wanted? 5 
Two things ; both which, it seems to us, are indispens- 
able for such men. They had a true, religious principle 
of morals ; and a single not a double aim in their activ- 
ity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers ; 
but seekers and worshippers of something far better 10 
than Self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; 
but a high, heroic idea of Keligion, of Patriotism, of 
heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other form, ever hovered 
before them ; in which cause, they neither shrunk from 
suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it as some- 15 
thing wonderful ; but patiently endured, counting it 
blessedness enough so to spend and be spent. Thus 
the " golden calf of Self-love," however curiously carved, 
was not their Deity ; but the Invisible Goodness, which 
alone is man's reasonable service. This feeling was as 20 
a celestial fountain, whose streams refreshed into glad- 
ness and beauty all the provinces of their otherwise too 
desolate existence. In a word, they willed one thing, 
to which all other things were subordinated, and made 
subservient ; and therefore they accomplished it. The 25 
wedge will rend rocks ; but its edge must be sharp and 
single : if it be double, the wedge is bruised in pieces 
and will rend nothing. 

Part of this superiority these men owed to their age ; 



90 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

in which heroism and devotedness were still practised, 
or at least not yet disbelieved in ; but much of it like- 
wise they owed to themselves. With Burns again it 
was different. His morality, in most of its practical 

5 points, is that of a mere worldly man ; enjoyment, in a 
finer or a coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and 
strives for. A noble instinct sometimes raises him above 
this ; but an instinct only, and acting only for moments. 
He has no Religion ; in the shallow age, where his days 

10 were cast, Religion was not discriminated from the New 
and Old Light forms of Religion ; and was, with these, 
becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, 
indeed, is alive with a trembling adoration, but there is 
no temple in his understanding. He lives in darkness 

15 and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at best, is 
an anxious wish ; like that of Rabelais, " a great Per- 
haps." 

He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could he 
but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided 

20 heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could 
have followed it, is but another form of Wisdom, of 
Religion ; is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this 
also was denied him. His poetry is a stray vagrant 
gleam, which will not be extinguished within him, yet 

25 rises not to be the true light of his path, but is often 
a wildfire that misleads him. It was not necessary for 
Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, " independent ; " but 
it was necessary for him to be at one with his own 
heart ; to place what was highest in his nature, highest 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 91 

also in his life ; " to seek within himself for that con- 
sistency and sequence, which external events would for 
ever refuse him." He was born a poet ; poetry was the 
celestial element of his being, and should have been the 
soul of his whole endeavors. Lifted into that serene 5 
ether, whither he had wings given him to mount, he 
would have needed no other elevation : Poverty, neglect, 
and all evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, 
were a small matter to him ; the pride and the passions 
of the world lay far beneath his feet ; and he looked 10 
down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, 
and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recogni- 
tion, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. 
Nay, we question whether for his culture as a Poet, 
poverty, and much suffering for a season, were not 15 
absolutely advantageous. Great men, in looking back 
over their lives, have testified to that effect. " I would 
not for much," says Jean Paul, '-'that I had been born 
richer." And yet Paul's birth was poor enough ; for, in 
another place, he adds ; " The prisoner's allowance is 20 
bread and water ; and I had often only the latter." But 
the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out 
the purest ; or, as he has himself expressed it, " the 
canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it has been trained 
in a darkened cage." 25 

A man like Burns might have divided his hours 
between poetry and virtuous industry ; industry which 
all true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has 
a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones : 



92 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men's 
banquets, was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. 
How could he be at ease at such banquets ? What had 
he to do there, mingling his music with the coarse roar 

5 of altogether earthly voices, and brightening the thick 
smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven ? 
Was it his aim to enjoy life ? To-morrow he must go 
drudge as an Exciseman ! We wonder not that Burns 
became moody, indignant, and at times an offender 

10 against certain rules of society ; but rather that he did 
not grow utterly frantic, and run a-muck against them 
all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or 
others' fault, ever know contentment or peaceable dili- 
gence for an hour ? What he did, under such perverse 

15 guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with 
astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his 
character. 

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness : 
but not in others ; only in himself ; least of all in 

20 simple increase of wealth and worldly " respectability." 
We hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy 
of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, 
have we not seen another instance of it in these very 
days ? Byron, a man of endowment considerably less 

25 ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a 
Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest 
worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by 
inheritance : the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, 
in another province, by his own hand. And what does 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 93 

all this avail him ? Is he happy, is he good, is he true ? 
Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives towards the In- 
finite and the Eternal ; and soon feels that all this is 
but mounting to the house-top to reach the stars ! Like 
Burns, he is only a proud man ; might like him have 5 
" purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the char- 
acter of Satan ; " for Satan also is Byron's grand exem- 
plar, the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently 
of his conduct. As in Burns's case, too, the celestial 
element will not mingle with the clay of earth ; both 10 
poet and man of the world he must not be ; vulgar 
Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration ; 
he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, 
is not happy ; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. 
His life is falsely arranged : the fire that is in him is 15 
not a strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the 
products of a world ; but it is the mad fire of a volcano ; 
and now, — we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, 
which ere long, will fill itself with snow ! 

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to 20 
their generation, to teach it a higher doctrine, a purer 
truth : they had a message to deliver, which left them no 
rest till it was accomplished ; in dim throes of pain, this 
divine behest lay smouldering within them ; for they 
knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious 25 
anticipation, and they had to die without articulately 
uttering it. They are in the camp of the Unconverted. 
Yet not as high messengers of rigorous though benignant 
truth, but as soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fel- 



94 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

lowship, will they live there ; they are first adulated, 
then persecuted ; they accomplish little for others ; they 
find no peace for themselves, but only death and the 
peace of the grave. We confess, it is not without a cer- 

5 tain mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble 
souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose 
with all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern 
moral taught in this piece of history, — twice told us in 
our own time ! Surely to men of like genius, if there be 

10 any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep impressive 
significance. Surely it would become such a man, fur- 
nished for the highest of all enterprises, that of being 
the Poet of his Age, to consider well what it is that he 
attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For the 

15 words of Milton are true in all times, and were never 
truer than in this : " He, who would write heroic poems, 
must make his whole life a heroic poem." If he cannot 
first so make his life, then let him hasten from this 
arena ; for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, 

20 are for him. Let him dwindle into a modish ballad-mon- 
ger ; let him worship and be-sing the idols of the time, 
and the time will not fail to reward him, — if, indeed, 
he can endure to live in that capacity ! Byron and 
Burns could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their 

25 own hearts consumed them ; and better it was for them 
that they could not. For it is not in the favor of the 
great, or of the small, but in a life of truth, and in the 
inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's or 
a Burns's strength must lie. Let the great stand aloof 



ESSAY OX BURNS. 95 

from him, or know how to reverence him. Beautiful is 
the union of wealth with favor and furtherance for liter- 
ature ; like the costliest flower-jar enclosing the loveliest 
amaranth. Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A 
true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or 5 
flattery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer 
of occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit ; he can- 
not be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. 
At the peril of both parties, let no such union be at- 
tempted ! Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the 10 
harness of a Drayhorse ? His hoofs are of fire, and his 
path is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands ; 
will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for 
earthly appetites, from door to door ? 

But we must stop short in these considerations, which 15 
would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something 
to say on the public moral character of Burns ; but this 
also we must forbear. We are far from regarding him 
as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; 
nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten 20 
thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that 
where the Plebisclta of common civic reputations are 
pronounced, he has seemed to us even there less worthy 
of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is 
habitually unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust 25 
on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as 
the substance : it decides, like a court of law, by dead 
statutes ; and not positively but negatively ; less on what 
is done right, than on what is, or is not, done wrong. 



96 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical 
orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of 
these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberra- 
tion. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the 

5 breadth of the solar system ; or it may be a city hippo- 
drome ; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a 
score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection 
only are measured ; and it is assumed that the diameter 
of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the 

10 same ratio when compared with them. Here lies the 
root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, 
Swifts, Eousseaus, which one never listens to with ap- 
proval. Granted, the ship comes into the harbor with 
shrouds and tackle damaged ; and the pilot is therefore 

15 blameworthy ; for he has not been all-wise and all- 
powerful ; but to know how blameworthy, tell us first 
whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only 
to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. 

With our readers in general, with men of right feeling 

20 anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In 
pitying admiration, he lies enshrined in all our hearts, 
in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble; 
neither will his Works, even as they are, pass away 
from the memory of man. While the Shakspeares and 

25 Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through the country 
of Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous, 
pearl-fishers on their waves; this little Valclusa Foun- 
tain will also arrest our eye : for this also is of Nature's 
own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the 



ESSAY OK BURNS. 97 

depths of the earth, with a full gushing current, into 
the light of clay ; and often will the traveller turn aside 
to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks 
and pines ! 



NOTES. 



To the Student. — The question has heen seriously mooted as to 
whether classic hooks, edited for the use of students, are too much 
or too little annotated. To this question, so conditional in character, 
no satisfactory answer has been given ; nor, from the very nature of 
the question, can there be. Perhaps the nearest approach to an 
answer may be made by allowing each student to be his own an- 
notator — on somewhat the same principle as "every man his own 
lawyer." Then, if he thinks a book over-annotated, he may reject 
the work of other "hands," even when "eminent," and construct 
his own notes; if under-annotated, he may enlarge the structure 
reared by another. Now, in a certain sense, and seriously speaking, 
that is exactly what every critical reader of Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
may, and ought to be, — his own annotator. For in the Essay are 
few recondite references to be explained, few obscure allusions to be 
illumined. The main purpose of the student should be to seize upon 
the spirit of the Essay, and, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, not 
let go till a blessing shall have been bestowed. It is for the student 
himself to read the poems which the author of the Essay analyses, — 
his own consciousness agreeing or differing; for the student, to mark 
with approving pencil the passages in the Essay that most strongly 
appeal to him ; for the student, to catch the swing and rugged rhythm 
of Carlyle's English, and note the sturdy vigor of his thought: be- 
yond all, for the student to apprehend the nobleness of sentiment 
expressed, — remembering also that " the proper office of literature is 
to take note of sentiment, and the higher the sentiment the higher 
the literature." By that right standard judged, how lofty is the place 
of the Essay on Burns! But that sentiment, mark, must be felt by 

99 



100 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

the student-reader for himself, and not through another. And so, 
the office of the editor becomes a minor and lowly one, — to point, 
here and there, to certain beauties or defects; to explain, to compare, 
to suggest, to hid the reader to consult, — leaving to him the higher 
task of strengthening and enriching mind and heart by contempla- 
tion of noble thoughts. I simply add, that I have not intermeddled 
with the essayist's punctuation and capitalization, — often pecu- 
liar, sometimes puzzling, — but too characteristic of Carlyle to be 
changed ! 



A single note must here suffice upon what may be called Carlyle 's 
Introduction to the Essay ; namely, his brief review of Lockhart's 
"Life of Robert Burns," — a book which gave impulse to Carlyle's 
own view of the poet: The inventor of a spinning-jenny (p. 5, 
1. 6). We are not so sure. It is more probable that somebody may 
rob him of it. But the poet's invention it is hard to steal. He 
indeed may not get the reward, but neither shall another. The 
character of Burns (p. 18, 1. 7). A true prediction; witness the 
remarkable honors paid to his memory, summer of 1896, one hundred 
years after his death. Or visible only by light (p. 19, 1. 5, 6). A 
fine figure of speech ! And to-day the poet, shining by his own clear 
light, the little men of his time are obscured by very " excess " of his 
brightness. This ... is not painting a portrait (p. 20, 1. 5, 6). 
But watch with what a masterly hand Carlyle fills in and finishes 
his portrait. How did the world (p. 21, 1. 23). A very compre- 
hensive series of questions by which to gauge the character and 
influence of the poet. It will repay the student to learn these ques- 
tions as a formula for testing the work and worth of writers. 



Page 22, Line 15. Burns first came upon the world. Let 

the student read with care this paragraph, descriptive of the sudden 
flaming and as speedy flickering of the poetic light, and of the 
re-illumining at the poet's death. Note also the strong way in 
which Carlyle sets forth the achievements of the poet, when his 
disadvantages are summed up! 



NOTES. 101 

Page 24, Line 2. a Fergusson or Ramsay. The former is quite 
forgotten ; the latter, remembered chiefly by an exquisite pastoral 
poem, dear to every lover of Scottish verse, " The Gentle Shepherd." 

P. 24, 1. 19, 20. the genius of Burns was never seen. The 
writer of these notes had the temerity once to say at a Burns ban- 
quet: The true poet rhymes by inspiration, the false by perspiration. 
He was sharply criticized by a learned doctor present at the feast ; 
but does not the essayist here prove the truth of the remark, and 
show Burns to be a true poet ? 

P. 24, 1. 29, p. 25, 1. 1. Criticism ... a cold business. Is it not 
refreshing to read Carlyle's disclaimer, — "not so sure of this"? 
From this line on through the Essay one feels the throbbings of a 
sympathetic heart, and is made to see in Burns the man (despite 
his shortcomings) a ■ greater charm, somehow, than in Burns the 
poet. 

P. 25, 1. 23, But a true poet. Reader, ask yourself why he is 
"the most precious gift; " for there are other reasons than those 
here stated by the essayist. And every reason possible should be 
urged, in these utilitarian days, to strengthen your own love of true 
poetry, and to win others to espousement of its claims and charms. 

P. 27, 1. 28, 29. the majesty of Poetry and 3Ianhood. Find 
illustrations of this double-blossoming truth in the poems of Burns. 

P. 29, 1. 27. To try by the strict rules of Art. What does the 
reader think? — Was the poet "true to Nature," and does Nature 
transcend " the strict rales of Art " ? Or, would more of Art, less of 
Nature, have been better? 

P. 29, 1. 22. from the palace to the hut. I once heard a critic 
say that Burns could never be a world-read poet because his poems 
were too dialectic. Was he right? 

P. 30, 1. 1, 2. his sincerity, his indisputable air of Truth. 
Must we not agree with the essayist, that this is the quality in a 
writer which wins? Name over in you-r mind various authors, and 
apply the test. 

P. 30, 1. 19. Si vis me flere. Here the point is, if a poet would 
win appreciation he must be in earnest. It is related of Carlyle that 
he said to a young man, listless, who came to him for advice — 
"Young man if you expect me to be interested, you must be in- 
terested yourself." 



102 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Page 31, Lines 14, 15. Affectation, the bane of literature, 

as Cant ... of morals. The true Carlylean philosophy of life and 
letters is here stated in no uncertain words. And is not the great 
Scotchman right? Apply again the test, as just now you did in the 
matter of sincerity, and note the results. 

P. 33, 1. 10. Certain of his Letters. There is no truer bit of 
criticism in all the Essay than this concerning the poet's prose. It 
may well lead the student to careful consideration of the inherent 
differences between a perfect style in poetry and in prose. And re- 
member this from Lowell: "Style is the establishment of a perfect 
mutual understanding between the worker and his material." 

P. 34, 1. 15. his choice of subjects. In this paragraph Carlyle 
seems to intimate that, to the real poet, one subject is as good as 
another for poetic treatment. Does the reader agree with him ? If 
not, can you hold with him when he declares that the best sub- 
jects are certain happenings "in God's world, and in the heart of 
man "? 

P. 36, 1. 9-14. Tragedy . . . Comedy . . . Laughter . . . 
Farce. Note the admirable way in which the essayist sums up the 
various forms in which the " poet born " may express his thought. 

P. 37, 1. 4, 5. as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. 
How keen and subtle the discrimination here! Who has not read 
of men who failed to become poets because they lacked the poetic 
heart, though possessing the poetic tongue ? 

P. 38, 1. 6. Is not every genius an impossibility till he ap- 
pear ? Let the reader ponder the force of this suggestion, and the 
sweep and beauty of the illustrative argument by which the essayist 
answers his own question. And if then he doubt, let him view the 
poems alluded to, and doubt will surely vanish. 'Twixt the essay- 
ist and the poet he may learn what genius is. 

P. 38, 1. 29, p. 39, 1. 1. a certain rugged sterling worth. The 
whole expression is a telling one, and sets forth a remarkable feature 
of Burns's poems. Follow the essayist as he expatiates upon this 
quality, and test others of your poetic acquaintance by this standard. 

P. 40, 1. 7. This clearness of sight; the impetuous force of 
his conceptions (p. 40, 1. 23), vigor of his strictly intellectual 
perceptions (p. 41, 1. 6). A trio of qualities of utmost importance 
to a great poet — and yet, as Carlyle sets forth, possessed by few in 



NOTES. 103 

the degree in which they belong to Bums. But just what is here 
meant by " clearness of sight " ? " conceptions "? " perceptions " ? 

Page 40, Lines 13, 15. Who was Homer ? Richardson ? 
Defoe? Is Carlyle's estimate of them just? And is it the same 
kind of power which enchains us in these three men? 

P. 42, 1. 16, 17. the intellectual gift of Burns is fine. We 
like this discriminating use of the word " fine." It is not ex- 
actly the opposite of the word coarse, but a blending of thoughts 
so subtle and delicate that they seem to shrink from expression in 
words — the sensitive flower of the mind. 

P. 44, 1. 8, 9. his light ... his warmth. The first, as Carlyle 
so well puts it, "keeness of insight; " the second, " keeness of feel- 
ing." In Burns, we are told, both were present ; and they made him 
a greater poet than either quality alone, no matter how great in de- 
gree, could possibly have done. The wise head, the loving heart — 
these are the light and the warmth, to usher in the day of Poetry, 
and to flood it with sunshine. 

P. 46, 1. 1,2. Dr. Slop; Uncle Toby: Characters in Sterne's 
"Tristram Shandy." 

P. 46, 1. 5, 6. Scots wha' hae wi' Wallace bled. Perhaps Car- 
lyle's contention is right — that this " war-ode " is the best ever writ- 
ten. At least it will well repay the student to seek the sources 
of its undoubted power — especially as the essayist, strangely, has 
given us no analysis ; yes, and to compare with it other battle-cries. 

P. 47, 1. 5. at Thebes, and in Pelops' line. An allusion to the 
famous lines of Milton in " II Penseroso: " 

" Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy 
In sceptred pall come sweeping by, 
Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line, 
Or the tale of Troy divine." 

P. 47, 1. 16, 17. the . . . principle of Love. The Love of which 
Carlyle speaks as the "great characteristic of Burns," it would be 
very difficult perfectly to describe; but does he not at least mean 
that principle which harbors in its heart no unkind thought of any 
sentient creature, or even insensate creation, from the hand of God ? 
For this view of Love, read "To a Mouse" and "To a Mountain 
Daisy." See also how this same regal principle, ever and anon, in 



104 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Burns, manifests itself in the shape of Humor (p. 47 1. 19). Here 
the finely-shaded thought of Carlyle, and the beauty of his diction, 
light up the whole paragraph, giving us a new thought of the wide 
difference between caricaturing drollery and the tender sportfulness 
of real humor, and showing in -a few deft words how Burns was a 
master in both. 

Page 48, Lines 14, 15. Tarn O'Shanter. What Carlyle says 
concerning this poem plainly shows that the critic is not given 
over to unstinted and unqualified praise of all the poet has writ- 
ten. Yet we venture to predict that whosoever reads "Tarn" and 
"The Jolly Beggars" with critical care, and then, with equal care, 
Carlyle's comments upon the contrasted poems, will own the critic 
to be just and right. 

P. 48, 1. 28. not the Tieck but the Musaus. German poets, — 
the latter, author of some very pleasing and popular tales ; the for- 
mer, the leader of an older romantic and highly imaginative school 
of poetry. 



THE SONGS OF BURNS. 

Note. — On this part of his subject Carlyle speaks with such rare 
felicity and potency that we can but urge the reader to follow the 
essayist closely through every "winding bout," striving to see the 
things the author sees, and as he sees them. Observe that, at once, 
he pronounces the songs of Burns his " most finished, complete, and 
truly inspired pieces." 

P. 51, 1. 2, 3. genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. 
These are great words to conjure with in order to start the true spirit 
of poetry. Moreover, it is the union of the two in one personality 
that makes the poet, and especially the lyric poet. Together they 
form the tongue fitted to "utter the thoughts that arise." Rare 
blending! May we not say of Burns's Songs, as did Carlyle in his 
day, " the best that Britain has yet produced " ? And yet, I would 
like to commend to the reader, just here, a modern poet of our own 
land, who, for heart-music and fine poetic feeling is well-nigh un- 
matched — Sidney Lanier. 



NOTES. 105 

Picture-like phrases: tawdry, hollow, wine-bred madrigals 
. . . sentimental sensuality. 

Page 51, Line 19. Short of the Soul. How true the intimation, 
that the songs that come not from the soul can never reach the 
soul! "Look, then, into thine heart, and write " — says Longfellow. 
The trouble with many so-called poets is, that they find nothing 
worthy when they do look, if look they ever do. 

P. 51, 1. 28-29. in themselves are music. A whole essay 
might be written upon the relation of music to verse — or rather, 
upon the element of music in verse. (See the "Science of Verse" 
by Lanier). But here how suggestive of that elemental relationship 
are the italicized words of Carlyle himself, as he affirms of the 
story and the feeling of a song that they are not said . . . but sung 
. . . in warblings. "Such harmony is in immortal souls" — of 
true lyric poets. 

P. 52, 1. 9. drops of songs. This allusion to Shakespeare's 
songs is very delicate and true. They are indeed as hard to analyze 
as raindrops, and they sparkle in the sunlight of the poet's gracious 
words. 

P. 52, 1. 13, 14. force and truth of sentiment and inward 
meaning. If the song sung by the poet has a meaning of the soul, 
and its sentiment has power and truth within it, what a noble har- 
mony there may exist between the inner music of the poet's heart 
and the outer music of his voice! 

P. 52, 1. 28, 29. a tone and words for every mood of man's 
heart. This is highest honor of all — to voice the multifarious 
moods of man. What power is comparable to this? Can the orator 
attain unto it? 

P. 53, 1. 5. our Fletcher's aphorism. Often quoted, and as 
often misquoted, there is great suggestiveness in Andrew Fletcher's 
sentiment. But the student will do well to find out just what it 
means — to the end that he may answer the shrewd politician, who 
"allows" that if he may make the laws, he'll not care how many 
songs the rhymesters write ! 

P. 53, 1. 23. the Literature of Scotland. There are people to- 
day who talk of the insularity of Scottish literature; but it certainly 
is continent-wide in its reach in comparison with the days before 
Burns, — and to the poet, Carlyle rightly ascribes the national literary 
quickening. 



106 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Page 55, Line 4. the natural impetuosity of intellect. No 

telling how serviceable such a trait may be, or how destructive, — 
according as the current of mental activity flows in right channels 
or not. Yet even if it overflows the banks, now and then, may it 
not irrigate arid wastes? Did not Carlyle even so in the impetuous 
rush of his imperial intellect ? 

P. 55, 1. 27, 28. We hope there is a patriotism founded on 
something better than prejudice. It is a very manly and noble 
plea which Carlyle makes for his own country, his " stern Mother- 
land." And although his primary reference seems to be to the 
desirability of choosing domestic themes, habits, humors, and the 
like, still he soon drifts into that thought of "the love of country" 
which he found so marked in Robert Burns's character and life. 
Now, there are different ways of serving one's country; and the 
poet's way was voiced by him in the earnest wish — 

" That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
Some useful plan or book could make, 
Or sing a sang at least." 

How grand the consummation of his wish, many a deathless " sang " 
of his attests. His patriotism inspired his pen, as did that of his 
great fellow-countryman, Sir Walter Scott, singing — 

" Breathes there the man with soul so dead 
Who never to himself hath said, 
This is my own, my native land!" 



THE LIFE OF BURNS 

Note. — In the pages that follow, the essayist has a hard task to 
perform, — to be critical, yet kind; not too sharply to accuse, yet by 
no means wholly to excuse. For he knew, as all the world knows, 
that the poet's life was far from being beyond reproach. Yet he has 
succeeded in a remarkable degree in a sketch of the life of Burns, 
which enchains attention and compels sympathy; and this, too, by 
no " special pleading," but by frank and manly admissions, and by 



NOTES. 107 

an analysis of character and motives most masterful. So we say 
here, as we said earlier, that it is not so much the mere facts of 
Burns's life as the interpretation and application of them that should 
engage the student's thought. 

Page 57, Line 30. the life he willed and was fated to lead. 
This is a most comprehensive expression, seemingly chosen with care 
hy the writer to reveal the two great forces that wrought upon the 
poet's lite: first, the self-inclination that impelled him on; second, 
the destiny that seemed ever to be tugging at him. Let the student 
recall Shakespeare, Byron, and other writers, seeking. their resem- 
blances, of a moral sort, to Burns. 

P. 58, 1. 24, 25. there is but one era in the life of Burns . . . 
the earliest. It is to be hoped that the reader will ponder carefully 
the main thought of this paragraph ; namely, that while the intellec- 
tual side of the poet's life grew apace, what may be called the pruden- 
tial side grew slowly — scarce at all; practical wisdom came not with 
the coming years. But cannot the student, out of his reading, recall 
other like cases ? Keats? Shelley? And why did it so happen? 

P. 59, 1. 20, 21. in borrowed colors. A thought somewhat akin 
to that put with unapproachable beauty by Wordsworth in " Intima- 
tions of Immortality," in the passage beginning, "Heaven lies about 
us in our infancy," and ending, "The man perceives it die away, 
and fade into the light of common day." 

P. 60, 1. 7. the only true happiness of a man. Carlyle uttered 
many great truths in his long-time plying of the pen, but not one 
more practical than this. Would that every young man might be 
guided by the light of its wisdom! This is the hardest examina- 
tion question of life to answer — For ivhat sphere of action am I, by 
nature and circumstances, best fitted and appointed ? Answer accu- 
rately, and act accordingly. 

P. 61, 1. 20, 21. Mighty events turn on a straw. The illustra- 
tion which Carlyle gives to prove this statement is very interesting. 
"Had Burns senior prospered, the boy Robert would have received 
an university training, and have come forth a trained literary work- 
man." But Carlyle's conclusion is startling, — this university man 
would have " changed the whole course of British literature." Will 
the student tell us how? — for Carlyle does not. And if so, changed 
it for gain or loss? In what respects? 



108 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Page 63, Lines 11, 12. a kind of mud-bath. Certainly a strong 
figure of speech ; but not a whit less strong the thought — and, as it 
seems to us, the truth — which the essayist here evolves. The stu- 
dent might put the question to himself in this wise: Is it needful, 
in order to attain unto real good in life, first to be practically con- 
versant with all the ill thereof? 

P. 64, 1. 24. the religious quarrels of his district. The writer 
of these notes recalls this scene: An excited group of men stand- 
ing in the gloaming before a cathedral in a Scotch city. Drawing 
near, I could dimly see, and very plainly hear, two men engaged 
in an animated theological discussion. Just such was the trend 
of talk in Scotland in Burns's day. But how clearly and forcibly 
Carlyle sets forth the futility and harm of it all in the case of the 
poet! 

P. 66, 1. 16, 17. Burns's appearance among the sages and 
nobles of Edinburgh. What a sight this must have been, — the 
peasant-poet standing in presence of the learned and titled! It is as 
fine in its literary suggestiveness as that of Luther at Worms and 
Paul at Athens in moral significance. His was the coronation of 
genius, as theirs of character. 

P. 71, 1. 29, p. 72. 1. 1. this winter did him great and lasting 
injury. The poet, as Carlyle says, bore well the "dazzling blaze of 
favor;" but when the glamorous lights had faded, and the wild 
winter of excitement had passed, he found himself at odds with his 
fortune and fate in life. And who cannot see that this condition 
will "work like madness in the brain," — especially in the sensitive 
brain and heart of a poet ? 

P. 74, 1. 7, 8. It reflects credit on the manliness and sound 
sense of Burns. This is the note, in spite of mufflings now and 
then, that rings out longest and clearest in the poet's life. Despite 
his lowly condition and adverse fortune, his failings, his faults, it is 
his own cry, — "A man's a man for a' that." 

P. 77, 1. 5, 6. Meteors of French Politics. See any extended 
life of Burns or edition of his writings to find the strong grip repub- 
lican notions had upon him. 

P. 80, 1. 26. at the crisis of Burns's life. Notice in this para- 
graph the " three gates of deliverance " open for the poet. (1) Clear 
poetical activity. (2) Madness. (3) Death. See also how the 



NOTES. 109 

essayist argues in brief each alternative, and engrave upon your 
memory, O Reader! the beautiful epitaph with which the paragraph 
closes. 

Page 81, Line 24. Contemplating this sad end of Burns. 
Here the argument of Carlyle, to prove that the world could not if 
it would have abidingly helped the poet, is very close-knit and com- 
pact. Friendship, he declares, no longer exists in "the old heroic 
sense." Patronage is " twice cursed " (what is Dr. Johnson's famous 
definition of a patron ?) ; modern Honor is a delusion and a mockery 

— based upon a Pride equally false and mocking ; Royalty might 
well stand as a fit representative of Dr. Johnson's patron. Now, let 
not the reader think that the essayist is simply carping and captious. 
How many instances confirm the truth of his words ! And surely no 
censorious critic would cry, as did Carlyle of the neglecters of the 
poet, " Let us pity and forgive them. But better than pity, let us 
go and do otherwise" 

P. 85, 1. 24. shown but small favor to its Teachers. A mag- 
nificent passage here follows, and well shows the passionateness of 
Carlyle' s nature. There is not an allusion that needs explanation 
to any intelligent reader; every name he names stands out like a 
mountain-peak above the low-lying plain of common history. But 
tell us, Why did the world show such small favor to its truly great 
ones ? 

P. 86, 1. 16. With himself. Now follows a very solemn passage 

— a tender lament of the great Scotch writer over this poetical 
Absalom. Poverty, he tells us later on (p. 88, 1. 18-21), it has often 
been the glory of poets to conquer ; but the requiem must be sung for 
him who lacks two things, — a true, religious principle of morality, 
a single aim of activity (p. 89, 1. 7, 8). 

P. 90, 1. 18-22. He loved Poetry warmly . . . could he but 
have loved it purely. . . . For Poetry, as Burns could have 
followed it, is but another form of Wisdom, of Religion. 
(P. 91, 1. 3.) He "was born a poet. These various expressions 
concerning poetry I have brought together, to the intent that in the 
light of them, and of foregoing pages, the student may inquire anew 
and for himself into the nature of true poetry, and also into the na- 
ture of Robert Burns the poet ; into the demands true poetry makes 
upon its creator ; into the way in which the poet met those demands. 



110 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

A complete inquiry may not be expected ; yet I cannot refrain from 
saying — happy the student who in early years learns something of 
the divine mission of Poetry! 

Page 93, Line 20. Byron and Burns. Carlyle, the moralist, 
shines forth in this comparison in a very strong and clear light. 
Follow him in the analysis of their longings, their failures, their 
woes. Then read with him the "stern moral" of the history. 

P. 94, 1. 13. the Poet of his Age. To whomsoever that high 
honor comes, let him consider what he attempts, and in what spirit, 
says the essayist. And then he quotes Milton — so masterly, in 
spots, in his prose English. Let us repeat the words here: " He who 
would write heroic poems must make his whole life a heroic poem." 
On the other hand, is there a shade of suggestion to modern poet- 
laureates in Carlyle's advice to let them " besing the idols of the 
time"? 

P. 95, 1. 10. Will a Courser of the Sun. An excellent example 
of Carlylean diction and imagery. 

P. 96, 1. 20, 21. In pitying admiration he lies enshrined in all 
our hearts. Reader, as we finish the study of this essay can we not 
re-echo this sentiment? May we not, also, enjoy "this little Val- 
clusa Fountain"? For, varying the Carlylean figure somewhat,— 
though in the poetic cup commended to our lips the sweet and the 
bitter commingle, — may we not still quaff it with pleasant memories 
of the poet, Robert Burns ? 



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